Spoiler: Image

Gunboat Hangar: This hangar module spawns packs of System Defence Gunboats armed with small-class weapons, to complement the station's larger gun batteries.

Parasite Gunboat hangar: Due to their gargantuan size, only Titans & Juggernauts can field this module. This oversized hangar complex comes complete with a microfabrication plant, Rather than spawning strike fighters, this hangar continuously spawns Parasite Gunboats armed with small guns to defend the mothership, they return to their mothership after the battle.

Due to their gargantuan size, only Titans & Juggernauts can field this module. Re-introduce 1-S ships as a "collective unit" - a Gunboat Squadron. Rather than just building 1 Gunboat at a time from a shipyard, you'd build a "Pack" of 3-5 Gunboats at a time, they would move together and be controlled as if they were a single unit, however. Similar to how you control a squad of infantry in an RTS, for example. As the gunboat unit loses health individual ships are crippled or explode. Repairing brings them back.

Support Gunboat: Re-examine their original purpose in the game. Originally these were meant to be support ships (hence extra utility slots) but most people used them as micro-tanks, packing as much armor on as they could. These ships could be brought back as early-midgame support ships to fill niches: Dedicated / 100% PD ships (they could be given an inherent bonus to PD accuracy or fire rate, for example) Buffers - they could be given special modules that buff/debuff other ships in combat (e.g. electronic warfare, reduce enemy aim by 5% - stacks upto 5x), like an early game / less effective version of titan auras. Special mechanics boarding ships - they ram enemy ships and your marines attempt to board/takeover the enemy vessel. Slave ships (for barbaric despoilers) - they land on enemy worlds and actively steal pops/resources being produced by that planet.

Re-examine their original purpose in the game.

I recently got back into modding some things for stellaris and have been going over my old projects. Long ago I posted this on reddit ( here ).As I discovered at the time, and subsequently forgot, in the early days of stellaris there used to be an additional ship class for corvettes. One that only came with 1 slot but carried more utilities slots (see the ship in the above image with a ?)You can see in this archived Wiki page here that it was referred to as the Shifter core (1S gun, 3S & 2M utilities) - we still have the other two corvette types in-game (the 3-S and the 1-S & 1-M and a 3-S variant with PD slots).From my 3d model inspection long ago it appears that this Shifter core corvette was also visually smaller than the typical corvette classes, at about 1/2 the size (though this is easily rescaled through code - indeed, rescaling ships was even a mechanic in stellaris once upon a time ).As best as I can tell, the vanilla phenotypes all have a "Shifter core" 3d model ready-to-go. But the Humanoids, Plantoids and Lithoids, which came later, do not. (though again, a "Shifter model" for those 3 packs could be created easily enough, by ripping off two turret discs from an interceptor corvette to leave just 1 weapons slot)I propose this "Shifter" corvette be re-introduced into the game (hencefourth ill refer to them as Gunboats, for simplicity). And have a few ideas of how it could be used, which i have included below:The way I see it, there is an entire class of ships lying around gathering dust in our installs of stellaris, going entirely unused. With a very small amount of work these ships could be reintegrated into the game, and could provide some creative new avenues for combat. It is a shame to let them go unused, particularly when PDX has mentioned in the past that artwork is expensive to do.Your thoughts?