Weapons, engines and mods, Oh my!

[PvK]

Originally posted by Andres:
Yes it was something about those lines.
It may be related the only time I tried to play in proportions I went bankrupt under the manteinance of my ships and the micromanaging hell pf my colonies.

Yeah, many players get surprised/disappointed by the smaller fleet size that is maintainable in a standard Proportions game. Ideally, there should perhaps be two Versions, or altered settings for people who want to be able to have massive fleets. Actually it's a simple change which I did mention in some long-lost thread: just increase the planet values by say 10x, or whatever increased bankroll you want everyone to have. (Ideally, the resource storage values would be increased similarly, but that's not that big a deal, nor hard to do).

But no, larger sizes should REDUCE, not increase cost and manteinance.
Of course that building and mantaining large ships cost much more than building a small one.
And in many cases using a ship only as big a needed is a good way to save.
But in real-world economies, large scale does significantly reduce costs. For example jumbojets and supertankers.
Why do you think they keep trying to make those things even larger?
They may be harder to build, require more technical refinenemts than smaller vessels, and of course each one needs a much larger inVersion to be built, but in the large picture they save money.

Larger ships can be more efficient in Proportions too, in the same way they can in real life - by being able to do more. Many of the same factors that multiply the ability of larger ships in the unmodded game are still present in Proportions. Large capital ships can be quite devastating, and larger transports can carry multiples of what smaller ones can, etc. In Proportions though, the attributes of larger hulls aren't ALL advantages.

Mainly, reality is much more complex than SE4, and it seems to me from considering real-world examples, that one of the constants is that bigger is almost universally more expensive per unit measure rather than less - it's up to the larger and more expensive designs to realize their worth through even better performance.

Detailed rambling musings on same, for those interested:

Smaller ships can use many more standard components, while larger ones require much more specialized large-scale equipment and infrastructure to build and maintain, as well as special skills and technologies developed to deal with their special problems.

For example, when the US re-commissioned WW2 battleships in the 1980's, there were many specialized skills for using their equipment which had been completely lost.

Building and maintaining a brand new fleet of gunboats of equal mass to a single battleship would be much less expensive, because it can be done with relatively standard industry and equipment. Whole new facilities and technologies need to be developed and supported in order to build and operate massive ships, in part because many of the required items (materials, facilities, know-how, and technologies) don't exist for any other purpose. Also, in reality, the more times you build the same device, the less the total effort, and not only are small ships generally built in more numbers, but there would be more of the required items that duplicate with existing non-military items. Such things can't be directly represented in SE4, but the maintenance cost seems like the most applicable place to me.

PvK