**WARNING: Long post ahead, digest slowly**
So your solution is to instead make the Tyrant a dead ship which is contrary to fluff? Go back and read my pros/cons post again. This is the best solution.
Need a 12WB, 180 pt, torp boat accessible to all lists. Giving the Dom the option to drop the NC does not do this. If you allow it in all lists as well as give it the option of torps or NC then it would need to have the NC version cost 200 pts. Either way the Dom would become very common and the Tyrant would get even more buried than it currently is. Currently some people take it because they want WB/torps. Even when you drop the cost by 5 pts it's going to lose some players because the Dom will have torps.
Currently the Dom is over represented and the Tyrant is under represented.
Let's look at what options we currently have available.
We have the current Dom: 12 WB, NC, 190 pts - limited list availability
We have the base Tyrant: 10WB, 4@45cm, torps, 180 pts
We have range Tyrant: 10WB, 45cm, torps, 190 pts
We have NC Tyrant: 10WB, 4@45cm, NC, 200 pts
We have range/NC Tyrant: 10WB, 45cm, NC, 210 pts
The base Tyrant is utter rubbish. The only reason to take it would be its cheaper cost and wanting to have WBs/torps. You still lose out however. No, assuming that we're going to make a 12WB + torp base option for 180 pts somewhere along the line (be it a modified Dom or Tyrant) we can simply delete this option, as it's pointless. So let's look at those options again without mixed range Tyrant.
We have the current Dom: 12 WB, NC, 190 pts - limited list availability
We have range Tyrant: 10WB, 45cm, torps, 190 pts
We have range/NC Tyrant: 10WB, 45cm, NC, 210 pts
We have new base cruiser: 12 WB, torps, 180 pts
These will be the options open to a player should we replace the useless mixed range Tyrant option with the much desired WB base ship. So saying that there will be not enough difference between class A or class B blah blah is just a way of saying that the options are not so fantastic. If this is true then the existing options only lose their attraction by comparison to the addition of a more desirable option (WB base line ship).
I have no problem with the attraction of those options going down. To me there was never any attraction for the base Tyrant, at lowered cost or not. The same goes for the range upgraded Tyrant. I do not even want the NC. No, the reason I always like the Dominator best was because it was a WB line cruiser. It also had nice synergy between its broadsides and NC, but a NC Lunar can get that too (albeit at a greater cost).
So, with the completed set of line cruisers (all lance, all WB, mix) then the NC/range options become just that; options. Flavour. A place to dump extra points. This is a natural consequence of giving us the WB line cruiser and is fine to me.
If we make it as some sort of alteration to the Dominator then we will have a problem. It will not be available to all lists. We could add the Dominator to the other lists. Then the cheap NC is no longer an attribute of a select few lists and becomes available to all lists. So then we'd have to drop it, and cost the NC option at the full +20 pts. You could do all that, but it's a lot of changes and is a long way from the fluff.
If we make it as a straight replacement to the base mixed range Tyrant (ie, simply replacing 4WB@45cm with 6WB@30cm) then we make the Dominator the rare ship, as per fluff, have the 12 WB torp ship available to all lists, allowing us to keep the cheap NC Dom available to select fleets (BBB, segmentum Ultima), give different options (10 pts for range, 10 pts for NC or 30 pts for both) and require a minimal adjustment to fluff. Namely that the range upgrade was a refit to an existing class rather than being built from the ground up.
This latter option is by far the best. All the objections that people are raising are either minor objections such as fluff, which this change is better for anyway or are objections based upon consequences that will occur simply by making a 12WB, torp boat at 180, regardless of whether it is the Tyrant or Dom that gets it (ie, devaluing of other options).
This just leaves whether or not giving the 12WB torp boat is a good idea to begin with. Well, logically it's fine, it's the equivalent of either the Gothic or Lunar. Both those ships are taken often and form the backbone of the IN fleet, and a basis of comparison for nearly every other ship in the game. Presumably the decision between WBs and lances is a personal one, since they're equivalent in value. As it stands people often choose the Dominator anyway, simply because they want the WB broadside. This raises some problems, since some of those that do this actually want the torps and some are overloading on NCs deliberately. This latter scenario is not unbalanced I think, but is probably unfluffy and some people have a problem with it. The people that want the former should not be mistaken for those that want the latter. Those that take the Tyrant because they just want WBs and torps (not range or NC) should not be penalised the reduced firepower for doing so.
So yes, there is a strong case for granting the 12WB torp boat. The very best way of achieving this is making it standard on the Tyrant, as it solves all solvable problems. If you really want to you could make the Tyrant 10WB at 45cm standard for 190 pts with the option being a downgrade to 12WB at 30cm for -10 pts, but this is just semantics.
