Skeleton Crew Ships

[Killer_Rabbit]

With the YOLOL and other devices in the game I would imagine it would be possible to link a number of batteries (each containing several powerful weapons such as rail cannons or plasma throwers) to a single turret manned by one player. As such you could have large ships with a comparatively small crew would these large ships still be designated as Battleships or Cruisers or would they still count as gunships or other smaller craft. Furthermore these ships with all the room could still be operated by more crew and contain seating areas to accommodate for marines that outside of an important battle would be left with a smaller crew/ complement of marines for patrol

 

[CalenLoki]

Yes, and no.
Manning guns and piloting are just two of multiple things you need crew for.

The game seems to be balanced as "easy to disable, hard to destroy". Thus single stray bullet can cut important cable and disable some important device. Fixing such small damage is fast (thus feasible in combat), but require big enough repair crew.

Every breach of the fuel pipe makes it leak, and fuel is corrosive. On large ship it could easily go unnoticed, quickly depleting most of fuel supply.
That could be mitigated with Yolol checking how fast tanks are drained compared to thrust, but finding and fixing the leak is way easier with bigger crew.

As of now guns have quite small ammo mags, and reloading is done by hand. That limits undercrewed ships to energy based weapons.
Obviously people already think about making autoloaders, but those would make guns bulkier, heavier, more fragile and volatile (ammo storage need to be closer to the gun).

Spotting is manual as well, so each pair of eyes starring into space help mitigating blind spots.

The bigger the ship, the less manoeuvrable, slower and easier target. It may happen that they'll be worse for combat than their cost equivalent in smaller ships.

Large ships are also more expensive to operate (fuel, maintenance, repairs) so if you can't use their full potential (due to not enough crew), it may be better to take something smaller.