Big ship supremacy... Can little ships keep up?

[Baron Munchausen]

Imperator Fyron said:
The purpose of multiple hulls available is so you don't use your big 2000 kT hull with only 400 kT used to make a small ship. This is especially important in any mod that has scaling of any sort (including, but not limited to, QNP). The problem with stock is that there is not any reason to build those small ships... The proposed type of setup absolutely requires a lot of rebalancing to make different hulls meaningful.

Which is to re-phrase what already said, that the current ship design system doesn't take scale into account. A larger ship ought to be proportionally more expensive to build and maintain because you need more materials or at least more elaborate engineering to make a larger structure work. A larger ship ought to require proportionally more engines, or at the very least the same proportion of engines, for the same performance. But in fact ships become more and more 'efficient' as they become larger in the SE IV system. Using less than the maximum tonnage for a given hull doesn't make your ships faster or more maneuverable either. Bizarre.