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

[Dizzy]

Baron Munchausen said: <Snip>
...the current ship design system doesn't take scale into account. A larger ship ought to be proportionally more expensive to build and maintain

Well, you cant make hulls too much more expensive cuz the AI wants to always build the biggest ships. So you can take advantage of that and build more numerous smaller hulls.

One way to make the gulf narrower between large and smaller hulls would be to nerf the weapon mounts. All the large and heavy and massive mounts would need the same scaling damage equal to the tonnage increase. That way they are no more powerful than smaller hulls.

There is a way to make the engine scaling issue a little better... Speed up the smaller ships somewhat and make the bigger ships a bit slower using the max engines in vehiclesize.txt.

I have an idea for mounts that'd be cool... Since the mounts would be equally scaled no matter the hull size, mounts would need some flavor. I suggest some basic types that give and take. For example, besides the standard scaled mount have 3 others; an Accuracy mount adds to hit but subtracts some damage %, also an Extended range and Overload mount to round it out.

The AI could use AI tags to identify with a particular mount so instead of setting up ALL the AI with standard scaled mounts, we could have some AI that use variety. I.E., the Cue Cappa would use the extended range mounts on all their weapons... cuz with their long eye stalks, they can see farther. Or something.