[Mylon]

Oh, I intended ships to still be made of components, I was just referring to the overall hull size being customizable (instead of limited to pre-set sizes). Thus, if you have a size 500kT hull and you fill it with 45kT components, you would only have 495kT used. You could either scale it back by 5 kT or scale it up by 40kT to elimate the excess space (and make the ship slightly cheaper) or make room for one extra component.

If gravity isn't an issue, space ships don't have to support their own weight, so there shouldn't be any limit on size. The limit should just be on how feasable it is to put it together, which is more a matter of how much the empire can pay.

edit: Oh wait, you were talking about the first suggestion I made. By all game purposes, yes, the ships will still be made of components, but for the purpose of programming and file structure, the game will have to remember each of the individual components instead of just remembering what model of component and how many. That is, using the one component with properties defined by current technology levels (instead of multiple components for each combination of technology levels), your old ship will have to be remembered as "Uber mega laser with lens tech 3, mini. tech 2, manuf. tech 5" instead of, "Uber mega laser CVIII".

Though if it stored it entirely based on stats ("Component name: Uber mega laser. Damage: 1337, range 2, size 35kT, ect...") then there could be some interesting possibilities... Imagine an engineering bay that subtle "optimized" your ships each turn they spent in the bay. You can research technologies to make your whole fleet better, or you can invest resources to make an extremely optimized fleet. Or your fleet just stumbles on an alien artifact that latches onto your hull and merges with it, increasing armor for that particular ship/fleet but refusing to give up any secrets. Or other fun stuff.