I think we need to look at the history of this game to even understand what is the original topic and why its been suggested.
Wings and battlegroup was once a integral part of planetarion and how alliances were set up.
In r4-r7 it was very common that attacks were set up in the private galaxies, or in larger groups of friends with close ties to each other, usualy playing in the same alliance or on the same side of the often split univers. Attacks were rarely set up by the alliance, and most alliances based their whole offensive sides on strong BGs doing a lot of the lifting.
Back then, the targets were avaible to attack for the battlegroup members only, and the target gal were often chosen from a target list by the BGs.
Ties and relations within the BGs were often a lot tighter than the relationship between two members in diffrent BGs for obvious reason that you had more contact with these people than with others, and the feeling of cooperating together was very important to this.
Clearly the game was very diffrent back in the those days, and the playerbase/alliances were a lot bigger, but one thing is for certain, a lot of alliances have sprung out from such Groups.
Now, is BGs still relevant in todays PA?
Most allies ive been in the last few days actualy only do one public attack for the whole alliance, and there is very few alliances with have multiple battlegroups.
Often certain alliances can go 95% of the round, only hitting gals, never P-Targetting, or focusing on something else than trying to cap more roids than they lose and not trying to aggrivate someone else meanwhile doing this.
Im pretty sure a lot of alliances that have considered setting up some sort of system with battlegroups or accept battlegroups comming from another tag the round before, have questioned if its even worth the hassle, or they could be worried about creating some kind of vatican state inside their alliance, wich resides in channel where they dont have any Access, and thus less power to controll and influence.
With the small galaxies this round, it more or less means that more or less, 20 people can easily effectively roid/cover up two gals each night with 2-3 Waves in a scenario where everyone sends two attack fleets. So in a full tag this means that they should be able to set up 4 gals each night for attack.
The PA crew continues to play with the alliance limit/gal size and nature of the stats with no real reason given to the players why they do this, therefor this can change from round to round.
Now more or less to the point why i think it should be considered added to the game.
1. Taken from the creators hour a few weeks back.
<CH_Bot> (Q 13): <Anonymous> Can any thing be done to encourage and make small alliances a part of the game by incenticizing the small alliances to attract members?
<Lunar_Lamp> The alliance size debate is... polarising. I've heard some say "small alliances will grow PA, and large will kill it!" and others say "large alliances will grow PA, and small will kill it!"
<Lunar_Lamp> I would like for small alliances to be a strong part of the game, as friendships grow out of such alliances often. And this, apart from the benefits to PA, is great for all concerned
Lunar_Lamp seems to belive that friendships grows out from small alliances, and therefor PA team apparently is trying to look into ways for making it better for smaller tags.
The reduction of tag size have helped this a lot, and i actualy think trying to think of ways how to give bonuses to smaller tags is a long shot atm, we must work with what we have.
But friendship also grows out of smaller groups within bigger alliances aswell. Therefor i belive that trying to find up some solutions how to enable BGs to function a lot more smoother with the tools you got ingame is important.
2. Effects on the structure of the game.
Adding this to the game will certainly not effect any more aspects to the game than ingame attack claiming works, so its not a question of what the effect this might have on other things in the game.
3. The amount of coding.
The ingame alliance allready have a feature where you can create usergroups within the alliance, and give them special acces diffrent "admin" tools, info pages, and def/att tools.
You could easily just add another option to these usergroups, IE access a certain attack, or see the fleet movements of certain members within a certain user group.
4. Other uses.
Its pretty obvious that its very common that certain people are able to get LT/targets/Waves from sources within a hostile or neutral alliances. Now someone said earlier in this threat either trust your members or dont.
This would clearly make it a lot easier to keep most alliances more safe against leaks from within, and a lot easier to discover where the source from a leak is comming.
As i think this is a irritation of a major part of the univers, that certain people are playing for something else than the alliance tag, and this might hinder such people to effectively suceed with their game play.
All this for me sums up that this is something that seriously should be looked into and be considered, and implented as an option.
Maybe Blue_Esper, TheoDD, Mzyplkt come from alliances or backgrounds where BGs were more or less abnormal thing instead of a common thing, or from alliances wich had other tools, routines, or setups to deal with such things, i dont know.