[PvK]

But, can you take a ship designed to deploy a single drone or a single satellite or some mines, and use it to transport 100,000 people and all of their possessions and necessities, for several months through space, and keep them alive, without serious amounts of life support equipment? No.

Realistically speaking, cargo should not be completely interchangeable based on equal mass. At the least, units should include the mass and cost required to keep them intact for a long space voyage. Unfortunately, SE4 lacks SE3's restrictions on cargo type. The only way I see to mod in some distinction using SE4, is to make the population units so large that there becomes an incentive to build specialized ships which wouldn't be efficient to use for mundane transport. That is, starliners. If we do as you suggest, except keep the pop mass at 1000kT, then with some changes to starliners and their modules, maybe we can have starliners carrying about 10x as many population units, but remaining relatively slow, so unit transports would more efficiently be built on faster lower-capacity transport hulls, while population transport would more efficiently use starliners.

PvK