Presumably I'm not the first person to point out there's a reason why battleships are obselete for any form of naval warfare? And that they're only used in modern terms as either missile launch platforms (Russian Kirov class) or as sea-based artillery (Utah class), neither of which are particularly useful for space borne scenarios (latter can be performed by pretty much any vessel, former is an entirely different issue in space-planet ops)? And that force-projection is invariably more effective than a large, powerful but ultimately operational range-restricted vessel? (particularly when there are highly effective fighter/bomber borne weapons against capships)
Plus, is it not worth pointing out that maybe there are restrictions beyond energy and crew anyways? The Colossus almost melted it's hull firing beam cannons at the Sath - what would the impact be of a similar number of beams spread across a smaller hull?
Wasn't it the attitude of "bigger, heavier, more guns!" that saw the battleship being superceded and made obselete by carriers and fighter aircraft in the first place?
AS I said before, BB's are pulled becosue they can't close to effective range fast, or escape fast. In FS2 they can do both.
I'm not sure what you're point is. Any ship in FS1/2 can, within a reasonable time range, rapidly escape or arrive, although the actual accuracy of such a jump is open to interpretation. What the problem is, is that you also need to maneuver upon arrival into a firing position, or simply to avoid exposing your own weak side; this is why carrier/destroyer vessels (NB: the FS1 ref bible makes it pretty clear that destroyers are as much carriers as anything else) are king, because their fighter and bomber assets mean they have a massive coverage in terms of territory; if something jumps in close to a carrier, not only can the carrier retaliate with its own defensive weaponry, it can overwhelm the opposing vessel with fighter and bomber forces that operate at a level of speed and agility far above that of any capital ship. Unless you're suggesting a battleship-type class can be made to operate with both a mass of anti-fighter and anti-capital ship weaponry, without it being a very large use of resources, you're looking at a classic repeat of the problems the WW2 battleships had; gets within reasonable range of carrier, finds itself under attack from all angles by fighters/bombers whilst the carrier makes an exit.
Additionally, the concept of having precise jumps is a double edged sword; if you can say a battleship can jump in close to a carrier, it also means that there is sufficient technological tracking ability to track and harass any battleship with fighter group sorties. If you add stand-off artillery type weapons to the battleship, it then just adds further issues; how do you balance that with enemy fighter groups getting in close (because you can't just slap on aaaf weaponry without consequence), and if you use missiles like trebuchets, where does the ammo storage go?
In terms of fire coverage, again we run into the issues of heat, space, energy, etc restrictions. The Colossus was probably about as powerful as the Sathanas, but it had better fire coverage at the cost of individual damage (whereas the Sath had a great frontal attack but was very vulnerable elsewhere as a result). Even accounting for fighterbays, which only covered a tiny area (externally) of these vessels.
And The Colossus was not designed to fight anything as big as a Sath. It didn't have beam cannons designed for that, so to do more damage it had to overload them.
A BB would have beam cannons designed for that specific purpose (and would have reactors and heat sinks where the Collie has it's fighterbays)
Presumably then it would also have appropriate weaknesses, such as a lack of adequate AAAf defenses, then? Because you don't get anything without compromising somewhere else. Also, you can't just shove all the heatsinks & reactors in one place; remember you have to transfer either heat or coolant somehow, and that requires an infrastructure to do so that prevents any centralisation (plus it creates a huge vulnerable weakspot), plus additional issues in protecting said heatsinks (because you obviously can't just vent heat into the ship wholesale, if a beam cannon can generate enough to melt armour; plus I'm not sure how easy it is to vent externally, given that AFAIK you need some form of particle for heat transfer, and you're operating in a vacuum). Given that the largest ship in the fleet had difficulties powering beams to hurt a Sath, I doubt it'd be a problem easily solved in a smaller ship.
The problem is that your main justification centres around theoretical weaponry and technology; namely reducing crew requirements, longer range weaponry, assumptions about heat and energy requirements, and presuming that it's even possible to load up a ship with both long range, point defense, and anti-capship weaponry with higher armour and absolutely no consequences in terms of size/profile or cost.
Essentially a wrecking ball of a ship laden with a multitude of hitherto unseen turrets of remarkable power, range and low heat/energy requirements and possesing nigh-invulnerable armour that sits and pulverizes a willing enemy force and has no weaknesses beyond less fighters (but is somehow invulnerable to enemy bomber attack and not hunted down by more mobile enemy forces to be slowly attrited).
Unfortunately, none of the required tech is seen to exist in FS2. I suppose you can justify it (the concept) existing in campaigns set afterwards, but there's a feasibility gap in doing so as you'd expect to see countermeasures - much in the same way as a destroyer is not invulnerable to attack (and there are also very solid gameplay reasons for such).
