Mobile shipyards... that's the solution.

Not hardly. For the price of creating a shipyard that could move you could make probably a division size battle fleet. The solution would be spread out massive complexes that could defended against a siege. With an attendant fleet of monitors of course.

a monitor would be classified as a ship lacking FTL engines and could be of any size. its role is to defend the ship yard till death.

The only difficulty in building a mobile shipyard is working on the means you use to hold the incomplete sub-assemblies together without rattling.
And as Arioch explained, there are several hours from the original jumping in of opposing forces till their actual arrival, and a shipyard doesn't really need heavy armour or shielding if the entire reason you fitted engines is to move away from combat, making it lighter and thus more mobile.

Compare A: a star ship equipped with a wide variety of highly complex and expensive alloys of armour and combat equipment
And B: A metallic frame used to secure and work on star ships for repair, probably with robotic arms for manoeuvring components, and additional hoops or fittings to allow major components to be 'strapped down' in the even of combat manoeuvres to evade.

If you ignore the Acceleration dampening, a Ship Yard like repair platform with big engines to make it mobile is still far easier to build, maintain and operate than a true warship.
In our terms contrast a Cargo ship and a Battleship, they are both similar sizes, but the cargo ship is far simpler and more modular in design than a battleship, and thus cheaper.
If they use momentum dampeners on their repair ship, it would significantly increase the cost, with the benefit that repairs could in theory occur while preforming manoeuvres.
I don't know for certain how useful that would be...
In general combat is generally described as long periods of mind-numbing boredom, punctuated by moments of absolute terror and intense activity.
If Outsider warfare is like this, the former shipyard is more useful. Meanwhile the latter is better for prolonged engagements.
Both are far more survivable and useful that a satellite design, which I might put in orbit despite it's lack of utility anyway, alongside more mobile models for the simple reason that having an 'easy target' can actually provide a worthwhile trap, not to mention while it remains in operation it can provide long term support to the system it resides in while more mobile variants may be required elsewhere.

Btw can someone run a simulation on the numbers of a craft with a max acceleration of 0.1 G for me? i'm curious if such a craft could be jump capable (ie build your satellites elsewhere as well as being able to send them home if problems arise)

I don't think that any front-line 'shipyard' would be tasked with actually building warships. It would more likely serve as a depot with repair, salvage & refit capabilities. For example, it might be able to replace the external ordnance rack on a Katana, in the middle of battle. Any ships too damaged to return to operational status during the battle would probably be ejected for later recovery.

it's normally cheaper to repair than replace, but to repair say one of their engines is probably a replacement job :p

That said, they are more likely to ferry a limited number of replacements/upgrades around with them (maybe inside the shipyards?) for quick repairs in combat situations. (IE: we got attacked yesterday, killed them all, but they could have another attack hit us at any time, so lets get as many ships back to operating spec as possible)

And any place you can preform intensive Ship repairs IS a Shipyard, even if it doesn't ever actually get used for complete construction jobs


Crazy idea: the shipyards come with all the standard engine sizes bolted on for mobility reasons and to act as replacements O_O

foti: not quite as crazy as you might think, assuming reaction thrusters, these things the loroi use however....dunno.

a mobile shipyard? not really practical when a ship is docked, a small inertial compensator where the crew are would probably be needed, a single large ship yard with stationary defences around it would be good, however it would be impractical to make these defence any thing more than a stop gap for when the fleet turns up as they would not only be expensive but also be hazards to move around