I find that the way the game handles the various ships sizes to be very counter-intuitive.
1. Engines are fixed size and provide a fixed movement bonus (and fixed cost and maintenance). So it is easier to make a fast, large ship than it is to make a fast, small ship.
2. Thrusters are also fixed size, though different ship sizes have multiplicative bonuses or penalties to tactical speed, so the case here is not so clear-cut.
3. Life support is fixed size with fixed bonus to range. So larger ships with larger crews apparently don't consume any more life support.
4. Weapons are also fixed size with fixed damage, though it is unclear to me what how or whether the damage from separate weapons stack and how they interact with stacking defenses. Assuming some level of stacking on both the attack and defense side (like in GC2), then the question of how weapon and defense effectiveness scales is going to be pretty complicated.
5. Ship space doesn't scale anything like in proportion to the names.
I feel as if all these factors are sort of pulling in different directions, and maybe the end result sort of makes sense, but the decisions used to get there feel a bit kludgy?
Like, the game encourages you to load up tiny ships with a lot of weapons and not much else, to try to do a lot of damage quickly before you are killed. The ships are mostly going to be a local threat with low strategic speed, low range and low sensors, but benefiting disproportionately from some addition bonus techs. I guess that sort of feels like defensive fighters, but the cost relative to a larger ship feels pretty high.
On the other hand, larger ships don't really feel very big when you are designing them, but it can become worthwhile to bother with a lot of specialist equipment, and they are probably pretty tough in terms of the number of tiny ships they can take out.
Given the other game systems, I can see why they don't want a huge ship to be hundreds of times the size (and cost) of a tiny ship. The UI and build queues would have to work very differently to make that viable. Still, the end result just seems very confused to me. There don't seem to be very clear roles for different ship sizes, and going for maximum hull size and maximum miniaturization seems like a winning combination all the time.
I'd like a game where there was a huge difference in scale between the largest and the smallest ships. Where you have swarms of small ships. Where the weapons that can hit the tiny, agile ships have a hard time hurting the big ships and vice versa.