Decrease weight for GSO10RC OTA

Hi.
I have plan to mount GSO10RC OTA on the Takahashi EM200 mount.
But if I mount 10RC OTA on EM200, it will exceed or approach maximum load capacity for EM200.
(I use QSI683WSG CCD with 5 filter wheel)
Anyway, for the more stable guide with 10RC, I have to decrease total weight.
So I have some question to decrease weight for my total system.
Please refer to below question and let me know yours advice.

1. GSO10RC have 2 losmandy dovetail plate (Upper side and lowerside)
-. If I do not use upper plate,(that mean, I use only bottom plate for mounting)
Dose it affect to OTA stiffness ??
(Both dovetail plate hold RC10 OTA with bolt assemble.
So I thought that maybe these plate also help to increase OTA stiffness)

2. To reduce load stress to mount, I also move down center of gravity of the OTA to close mount head.
-. To do this, I try to apply two tube rings.
Is it effective to reduce load stress ??
(I also hope it will be effective to reduce weight instead of using 2 dovetail.)

In the future, I will upgrade mount for more load capacity. But now I have no choice except my EM200 mount

Please give yours valuable information.

Thank you
Best regard JM.Choi

Not sure if you have the carbon fiber 10rc or not, but if so then it really needs the dovetail plates for support.
Rings will work on the carbon fiber but not sure it will decrease the weight. The plates that come with the 8-10RC are pretty lightweight.
The problem with weight is only half the issue. The focal length will make it harder too. Lightweight mounts have a hard time when near their limits.
Honestly I don't think you can get much weight off the scope.

The general rule of thumb used to be to go half the max weight capacity for long EFL "high mag" deep-sky imagery. That, and RA gear as big as the aperture. I know my extremely beefy 12.5-inch Cave Astrola was a nightmare to image with until I replaced the fiberglass tube with custom metal reinforced tube AND retrofitted a Byers 11+ inch RA drive, new zero-backlash Dec drive, off-axis guide splitter and SBIG autoguider. That gave me RMS guiding accuracy of 0.5 arc-sec RMS and never wandered more than about 1.5. But back in those days, DS film-based single continuous exposure times were 2 or 3 HOURS! EFL was ~2000mm. The guiding EFL was barlowed to 2500mm with a very mild custom barlow. That might seem totally nuts now...but was needed back then. Things would certainly be far more forgiving now with stacked, far shorter CCD exposures, etc. But I still think the consul to underload the mount by a lot will make imagery far less frustrating. Tom Dey