[PvK]

I'd like to hear what Andres meant.

Fryon, your two points are just insisting on simplifications where I intentionally added more detail:

Small ships are cheaper to maintain because that's how they are in real-world engineering, which is massively more complex than SE4. Maintaining a massive vehicle is more expensive than maintaining a bunch on smaller vehicles. This is one of the major reasons why smaller ships are more common in real-world naval and commercial fleets. Large ships are more powerful, and can win battles by their presence and over-powering the enemy large ships and then stomping on the smaller ones, but a fleet that only builds large ships is probably going to be less efficient on a cost basis.

As for speed, yes a simplified system could do that, but it's not by mistake that I made smaller ships capable of greater speeds. It's entirely reasonable that engineering limits would, for any level of technology, be able to make something smaller go faster than something larger. That is, if you accept the premise that building a working enormous ship is an engineering problem (the existence of the Ship Construction tech), then it is reasonable to assume that if your technology lets you make the largest ship you can build go at speed X, that you could use engineering trade-offs to achieve a higher speed with a ship that isn't so large. Again, there are tons of real-world and sci-fi comparisons where the same is true, and I think most consistent and detailed physical models would bear this out.

PvK

Edit: Oh, and Fryon, Proportions does meet your criteria for "proper" QNP. The only difference is that the maximum proportion of engines allowed to ship mass is greater for smaller ships, for the reasons mentioned above.

[ June 16, 2003, 01:31: Message edited by: PvK ]