Horatio Combat Enhancement and Manpower

Now, please inform me if I am incorrect, but manpower does not seem to have any direct effect on the outcome of a fleet battle.  What if the percentage of manpower in a fleet affected the firing rate of the fleet?  For instance, an Imperial fleet with 100% manpower would fire faster, and therefore perform better, than an identical Imperial fleet with 25% manpower.  This would make anti-manpower modules and tactics more effective and useful.

But this change would also fix the one biggest issue I have with the game; the fact that the Horatio are so terrible in fleet combat.  They have terrible ships that are more expensive than the ship of other races.  Pirates are basically impossible to deal with very early on, not to mention other major factions. 

The Horatio focus on food production, which manpower is directly affected by.  This is why, in general, Horatio have very high amounts of manpower.  To make this manpower change help the Horatio, their ships could have a higher percentage of maximum manpower than other races. For example, they could have a maximum of 120%.  Thus, their ships could (if the player has played correctly and worked on manpower) fire faster than those of other races.  This small change would make Horatio fleets hopefully not absolutely terrible compared to other factions, while not breaking the lore or radically changing the faction.

Possible negative of this idea:

Horatio could now be pretty strong in ground campaigns, as they have more manpower reserves to call on.  While this might not be a terrible thing, it could cause some balancing difficulties.  A possible fix would be to give the Horatio the "Feeble Warriors I" trait.  This would still be accurate, as they are all clones of Horatio Prime, who was probably not the most combat worthy person in the galaxy.