I play with a 12 number pad
MOBA Mouse (Utechsmart Venus)

And I aim to be able to move, drive, turn, and shoot, all while simultaneously commanding things as I do in BZR

Funtion row requires I stop pretty much all of that

I aim for that "feeling" to be as absolutely alien to me as possible.

While the mod strives to recreate as much of "Battlezone" original play style as possible, it does still exist in the BZ2 / BZCC game engine, and thus some features are hard coded (such as F1-F10 group keys)

I do wonder if your mouse has profiles you could set to bind the mouse keypad keys to the F#s. I know my friend has a gaming mouse that has that feature.

There's also a way to customize the keybinds in the cfg files, you could copy "bzgame_keys.cfg" from the game into your My Documents/My Games/Battlezone Combat Commander/BZC/addon folder, ditto for BZCTRO/addon, and customize the group keybinds there. That is the only way to move them from the F# buttons to other keys, such as the normal buttons (perhaps making them combo keys such as Ctr+1 - Ctr+10, or MMB + 1 - MMB + 10)