Quote Originally Posted by someguy View Post
One possibility is to do away with the legs and make them restartable landing struts. Or would that be too much like the battletech ship?

Now thats a good Idea. The lander has the same AR (Armor rating) as the main ship. It would keep it out of the way of the main thrusters. However, it would have to complete the sphere rather than just attach to the outer hull; otherwise it would downgrade the hull to Unstreamlined.
All the vehicle bays would have to be up top otherwise they couldn't transfer to the drop ship.
Right, the idea was to have a "crater" in the top where the ship would sit. The smaller ship could function as the bridge for the larger or could just be dead weight.

One other thing that's an option with the older concept of cylindrical drop ships is to use the manueuver drives of them as aux drives for the main ship.