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Edit: Besides, Weber has the planet right there if he needs to base ASFs from it. Protecting the factories in the rings, on the other hand ... that planet can literally be closer to the jump points than Catachan depending on where they are in their orbital paths.
With the warship-cum-station, rather than needing to run supplies out to each Union every few days with either a stream of small craft or another dropship, every few weeks you can send a mule with everything you need. Not only for the ASFs, but for the factories as well allowing a vastly simplified chain of logistics.
That makes sense. I must have overlooked that it was for the protection of the factory satellites.
It´s already in space so you might be able to use small craft / dropships to tug it slowly to its new position. That will take time but you won´t need any repaired transit drives for that.
Just some small station keeping drives for later on once it is in position. Of course the work to turn it into a space station should be done before moving it. Making it airtight, installing some fusion power plants, life support, communications, perhaps some anti-ASF weapons...
The Pinto carried 12 ASFs and 2 small craft plus 10,942 tons of cargo. With the removal of the capital naval weapons you gain another 6,500 tons of tonnage. The KF drive is very probably not functioning too, so remove it and sell it for the Germanium? Another 72,000 tons.
If you were to install 54 ASF bays and 6 small craft bays (just as an example) that would be still less than 10,000 tons. Quarters for crew and bay personnel, life support and power plants, you can just re-purpose the old spaces used for it. If they are accessible of course.
The main advantages the Pinto space station would have over any dropship is the tonnage and the hopefully repaired grav deck.
A quick and dirty check with MegaMekLab says that if you leave the not functioning transit drives alone, remove only 50% of the KF drive (no idea how much the Germanium part weights), keep 1,000 ton of fuel for the position keeping drives, same armor (92 tons), no weapons, 54 ASF bays, 6 small craft bays, crew quarters for everyone including bay personnel, you still would have around 60,000 tons to play with.
That of course might be reduced by parts of the hull not recoverable? And note that´s with keeping the destroyed transit drives in place and only removing half of the KF drive tonnage. If you leave the KF drive in place too because you don´t have the equipment to remove it, it still leaves you with roughly 25,000 tons of cargo.
A Titan carrier dropship with its 18 ASF carried around 3,000 tons of cargo. So 9,000 tons for 54 ASF plus - say - 1,000 tons for 6 small craft still leaves 10,000 to 15,000 tons of cargo. Enough perhaps to install some anti-ASF weapons on the station?