[Suicide Junkie]

P&N's QNP goes a long way towards that.

Since the engines scale up directly with ship size, the large ships only get economies of scale (Less % devoted to one-shot items like B/LS/CQ, and ECM/CS, and and special equipment such as scanners)

Large ships:
+ economies of scale as above
+ larger mounts
+ more damage must be done before you take hull damage. (A battleship has about the same shielding as two LCs, but a pair of LC's can be taken out one at a time)
- Defense penalties due to large sizes
- Really large ships can't move as fast.
- Easily crippled by penetration weapons, such as null space.
- larger ships are much easier to detect with grav sensors (ES and FG are the only ones that can be totally undetectable, DS & LC require very expensive grav sensors to find, and so on)