[Suicide Junkie]

Not strictly like in #1.

In GritEcon, I made build times scale with the CUBE of the hull size. The really big ships take forever.
To balance that, I made maintenance costs essentially flat. A huge ship would cost approximately the same to maintain as a tiny one.

Thusly, in peacetime, you can slowly build larger ships and scrap the tiny ones.
In heated wartimes, you'd pump out the small ships as fast as possible and throw them in as cannon fodder.