I really need help, because the wiki is lacking on articles for research mechanics.
There's usually four paths to choose from when researching tech, particularly ship tech to determine how to design your ships:
Hull Size/Mass Reduction
Logistics
Production Costs
Maintenance Costs
Ship design seems to be centered around 'Pick two, focus on one.'
Without knowing how Production Cost factors into things (and with it being too easy to get to single-turn production by mid-game barring slowing the game pacing down to a crawl) it's impossible to tell if Production Cost means it takes fewer turns to produce a given ship design using that part, or if it's related to buying the ship outright, both or neither.
I already understand maintenance costs indirectly makes your fleet larger when funds are tight, but categorically the only thing that seems to matter when playing someone like Iridium corp is to cram as much crap on to a ship as possible, since keeping enough threat on a ship to make defenses worth researching is tricky when most of your threat ends up on your offensive ships. For mass driver-focused ships (the RNG generates way too much Durantium and practically nothing of anything else, even on rare resources) this usually means the rapid reloaders end up on defense ships since the part's threat value is through the roof and they require tactical thrusters as well so nothing else gets targetted early, and the offensive ships have to deal with range extenders.
What I'm trying to wrap my head around, is if there's a way for overarching strategy to include using or focusing on anything besides hull size and miniaturization, because with smaller numbers of shipyards, medium-large ships work better than pumping out small-medium hulls mid-game.
Please help me understand production costs in simplified terms so I can make a more informed decision, I've found it extremely difficult to play as or find anything appealing other than Iridium on normal/gifted difficulty and a slow game pace so far. Once you have enough logistics to allow for that tactic, not being able to set specific fleets as rallying points really hurts when dealing with 'swarms' as opposed to 'warships' and actual fleets.