Structures are conceptually easy to understand and deploy and use and are relatively cheap to procure and maintain, so in this regard they are 100% newbie friendly. Keeping them alive, however, is not a matter of “newbie friendliness” but rather a matter of “teamwork” - you don’t need to be part of a large and well-established corp or alliance to make friends who will help you defend it. Stick to your treehouse corp and watch it burn. In general, no POS mechanic should exist to make it easy for treehouse corps to field them and keep them standing, too.
You know motherships are already a thing, right? Every capital ship + the Orca + Bowhead can carry other ships with it into space to resupply ships in the middle of battle. Combine this with existing structures capable of docking any ship and we’re basically set. (The notion that the smallest existing Upwell structure tier, M, of any variety can’t fit all subcapitals is ABSURD.)
We already have dreads and mauraders
We don’t need deployables/structures to serve in place of players. If you need more manpower, get more fleetmates. If you need more fleetmates, make more friends.
On this I can only say that some have longed for “S”-sized Upwell structures and have wondered in what ways they will be radically different from M/L/XL so as to justify what must be diminished capability and cost…
Per the above: existing ships already exist, unnecessarily redundant with existing M-sized structures which are already cheap and easy to use, and also offer a manpower advantage that should not be filled by means other than actual players in fleet.
This is precisely the kind of thing we do NOT want to see in EVE: we don’t need to see a few players have an armada of deployables giving them a massive advantage, we want to their power potential to scale with fleet size, and supremacy to be dictated by talent rather than N+1