Hotfoot: I was going by memory on the sizes, I may need to fix that one way or the other
(there will also be a one size lower stellar construction, FYI)
I'll take the effect on the fighters into account. I hadn't planned on the fighters (or bases, baseships, sats) being upgradable, but I guess I better..
The ship upragdes go like this.
Starting: Escort I
Research: Ship 1
Research: Escorts 1, get Corvete I
Reseatch: escorts 2, get Frigate I
research: escorts 3, get Destroyer I
Research: Escorts 4, get Corvete II
etc. for each class.
I plan on (eventually) adding 4 more racial traits: Energy Race (new tech tree), Totally Organic Race (new tech tree), miniturization, Swarm (new tree). Mini is self-explanitory, and I didn't think of it until you mentioned it
Swarm, simply put, cuts your costs to 1/3. It will probably be a 3000 point trait..
Hopefully componets.txt and techareas.txt don't have upper file-size limits
LT411: the design will probably take the longest. I don't plan on making major changes to components, so components.txt will only be a change of tech areas for each component, and that can be copy-pasted easily. There's no upper limit to family names, so I'll just slap a 999 or something on the front to set these apart for the AI. Techareas.txt will be the big change, and will probably take a bit.
Phoenix-D