@Hairless-Ape, I responded to your PMs, but it looks like my responses never made it to you (they are just sitting in my outbox and sent box), so here's a few files I've changed and a description of what the changes do. The files can be found here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dhMVLD ... share_link feel free to incorporate them, or take a look at the differences for your next roll-out. Due to the change in the turret script, It's highly recommended to start a new game.
-changed the turret script to support firing of turrets with lasers having greater than 10km range. I've also extended and adjusted the speed/ranges of a lot of weapons so that your cap ships can engage each other at meaningful distances, but don't have much chance of hitting smaller faster targets. With my current weapons setup, ranges kinda go in 5km brackets, so weapons designed to hit fighters have around 5km range and are fast, while M2 weapons have around 20km range and are quite slow. A tbullets and tweapons that I've been using are included, but that's sorta just for testing and is in no way balanced at this point.
-modified the fleet following behavior so that ships will now enter the selected formation of your commander. This ends up preventing quite a lot of collisions as larger ships keep a much wider berth when in formation. They will break formation when enemies enter the scanning range and will engage targets. They will re-enter formation once no more targets are left in scanning range.
-fixed the resupply ships following too closely (which keeps collisions down. I simply limited his follow range to slightly below the max transport range. You can now be in sector and he can get his job done without ramming everything. This also speeds up resupply, but that could be controlled by changing the script wait times if you think it's too fast. I also extended the transport teleport range for my game, but its not really necessary. The value can be found in types/globals if you want to change it.
Replacing the turret script mid game can cause issues, but seems to be smooth with a new game. If you replace midgame its advised to run the mayhem.debug.resetshipturrets scripts (not sure if this works correctly though). The current version has gone through 2 days/nights running with no issues and multiple battles consisting of hundreds of ships with a new game.
I'm still messing around with other things and want to really get into making the lasers more visually and racially unique. I finally got it figured out how to change the actual projectile sizes so that big guns from big ships look more impressive. I've also experimented with moving main guns for ships to turrets (since the AI has lots of issues making use of main guns). I've also been experimenting with adding missile turrets, so you can have more unique hybrid ships that's have a mix of missiles/lasers.
Another one of my goals once I figure out more of the menu setups is to be able to better configure the formations and roles of fleet members. Essentially where a fleet has a leader, and then you can setup sub-groups/leaders with their own followers and priority targeting. That and followers assigned to the subleaders will be in the chosen formation of the subleader, instead of all the ships making one giant formation based on only the fleet leader.
As for your original inquiry about the outposts and docks. I just felt that only having 4 huge docks, limited my ability to repair and resupply my fleets that consisted of more than 3 huge ships (since my resupply ship would also usually be taking a spot). It was more of a QoL thing for me to go to a 9 huge docks station since I like to have a mix of an M2, a M1 and some M7s and went sent home they would all just fly around the outpost like fools. There is also an 18 huge dock version, but I think that's a little overkill, but some crazy upgrade path to go to 9 docks, then 18 docks with potentially expanded population and specialization would make for a great military fleet/shipyard. Would also help make use of excess resources later in a campaign, especially if the upgrade took a few Mill in credits and 100-250k of some outpost/ship resources to upgrade. This of course is just an idea, I'm happy just using the 9 huge dock model right now.