I did an analysis of the marginal improvement of ratio of armor to internal volume (technically tonnage in aurora) on the old forum. See chart below. Basically smaller ships are inefficient (to achieve the same number of layers of armor at a given armor tech level), but the rate of improvement in efficiency really slows down somewhere between 20 and 40k tons.
That analysis did not include the marginal cost of things that don’t increase in size as ship size increases, e.g. sensors, bridge, CIC, etc.
I generally build my largest combat ships around 60k ton, as that, in my experience, is the sweet spot that balances ability to divide your forces to cover multiple areas vs staying power in a sustained fight. If your entire navy tonnage was concentrated in one ship, you can only ever be in once place at a time. If your ships are all super small, they are inefficiently designed (more space taken up by things you only need one of which have a fixed size, again e.g. sensors/bridge, and armor to tonnage ratio). Also, a navy of smaller ships starts losing firepower as each small ship gets penetrated, damaged, and destroyed sooner than less ships of larger individual tonnage.
I love how Aurora attracts players that are asking many of the same questions I do, but unlike me are actually equipped to find the answers.
Purely by intuition I previously tended to try to end up with main combatants in the 100kton range, which accounts for my subconscious brain telling me: “This looks good, now double it to be on the safe side!”
As a rule of thumb I’ve found my ship tonnages are roughly twice what their wet-navy equivalents in WWII would be. 4k for a destroyer, 20-30k for a cruiser, and battleships are 60-80k. That’s the weight at which their capabilities seem to match up well with the implications attached to the historical role titles. If you want a heavy cruiser that can stand in a battle-line but also conduct detached operations for a fair amount of time, you want them weighing in around 35-40k tons… or so I feel.
Very early on I didn’t understand how infrastructure worked so I made the classic noob mistake of “here you go colonists, enjoy mars” pushes them out of the ship with a couple of sticks. Anyway, I noticed they were dying off pretty quickly so in not my proudest moment I made a 1 million ton colony ship to take them there faster than they could die.
Subsequent mars colonies have been more successful.
The biggest ship I’ve ever “made” was like 2 million tons, which carried everything needed (population, infrastructure, survey craft.) to start up a colony for a start where that ship was the only thing I started with (had to find a suitable planet to settle on and build from there).
In the last game I’ve played (still technically playing it, just haven’t touched it for a while) my ship classes are: 6k ton “submarines”, 12k ton corvettes, 21k ton frigates (PD/jump vessels), 30k ton destroyers (Missile flingers), 60k ton cruisers (General purpose)/light carriers (cheap-ish way to inflate missile count and extend combat range), 80k ton battlecruisers (literally just there to take a pounding and turn anything that gets too close into swiss cheese with beams), and 100k ton fleet carriers (they do fleet carrier things).
Yeah, my ships are probably oversized which probably is why I always struggle to keep up with fleet sizes.
I have ended up making 200k250k carriers when I get to a high enough tech. I think of them like a super carrier. I give them at least 3year deployment time and have had up to 20 squadrons of fighters or bombers.
