Trachmyr- some of early mods did try and make several attack ships (essentially one for each hull size) in order to maximize the efficiency of each design. Currently, the Darlok, Sergetti and Zi'Chung in the TDM ModPack have multi-designs, so check them out for ideals. The problems with multiple designs are the following:
(1) Each "design" is still valid in later games, thus the AI will still build them in later games (partial solution - what we did was make a range of hull designs so that you had 3 types of attack/defense ships)
(2) The AI for some reason continues to re-design the multi-designs even at full tech start! This leads to hundreds of the same designs, which would not be a problem except for the retrofit minister gets chumped trying to retrofit a design with no changes. [Note - this may be fixed in the next patch]
Anyway, this has been an issue for awhile and I just wanted to let you know how we were dealing with it. I will stop rambling
