[Captain Kwok]

The stock sizes don't overlap to that extent where a light cruiser will have the same tonnage as a low-level battleship; plus clicking on a ship always tells you what type of hull it is. More importanly though is that all the different sizes are useless because stock SE:V is even worse than SE:IV when it comes to small vs large ship balance. A player won't even bother to research smaller hulls once that get the next level up - it's an absolute waste of research points.

Fortunately I have a ready-to-go mod that addresses this and many other balance issues with stock. In my balance mod, I drop each hull tech to 3 levels, with level 2 providing the next hull level up. Now it is still worthwhile to research that last level because a) It usually gives something like access to a mount or b) there's small-big ship balance so it's actually useful to keep smaller ships around.