Because if it's always favorable to build bigger, you end up with laggy beast staring each other down in extended peacetime in a game about custom spaceship fighting.
It's preferable to tilt things a bit toward the small ships so that fighting can happen at more managible scales. Not that small ships should be stronger than large ones, but they should be more resource/combat effectiveness efficient (with fleets of comparable overall resource costs) to a point to encourage size diversity around some max efficiency (bell curve etc.).
Anyways, since missile/beam is the only lockon anyways, and it sounds like it does this, looks good already.
But, it's not always favorable, nor is it more lagy. The I've seen several fights with 1.5-2mil total mass that went smoothly where only capital ship were involved, yet I see <500k worth of drones drop people to 1 FPS all the time. Going back to the issue of economy: people will get enough resources to make either big ships or same mass fleets of smaller ships. You can not stop that shy of constantly resetting servers every few weeks. However, the smaller ships require more AI cycles, more collision checks, more surface area to render, etc. Encouraging small ship tactics too heavily forces the players to choose what is bad for the server and other people's computers over what is bad for themselves.
Don't get me wrong, using small ships for gorilla warfare doing things like stealth bomber runs, and screening boarding attacks is a good thing for giving less established players a way to make themselves less worth the cost of beating, but if you push that balance any harder than the game already does, it becomes all about fighter tactics and you kill game performance, balance, and the community. Personally, I feel like overcharged spinal weapons and arc beams are already going way overboard to favor smaller ships when the simple fact that you are distributing your systems between multiple ships is a pretty solid balancing factor to poor AI to begin with. 2-5 small player ships will almost always beat a same mass single player.
Also, while not everyone likes making big ships, they take a lot of time to design and manufacture. This means players spend more time playing which keeps servers more active and reduces attrition of the player base. It also encourages multi-member factions because it makes people lean more on other players to gather the resources, design skills, etc to thrive, and because bigger ships are such an investment, established factions are more likely to recruit and teach newer players so that they can have human pilots to maximize their big investments. Being engaged in a faction also makes a player more likely to stick around, and/or come back after a leave of absence.
As for your peacetime comment, that has not been true in my experience. In 2017 alone, was involved in about 20 battles ranging from about 500k-5mil mass worth of total assets each, and that is excluding the competitions and special pirate events.
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I have considered this and concluded that it does not introduce a problem since it is possible to load a ship with more missiles than your refire rate will allow you to launch before a reload cycle, freeing up room for a continuous barrage of anti-fighter missiles and the occasional planet-buster.
Also, Schine never said anything about 'nerfing heterogenous loadouts' - that's your own interpretation. From their posted media, the design intent is to force players to be careful with launching their missiles in order to reduce server load and remove missile spam as a first-order optimal strategy while still allowing players the freedom to build however they want. They never said anything about forcing players to use only one type of missile. If they wanted to do that they could easily have written code to enforce such a paradigm.
Actually, that's exactly what "stopping missile spam" is. The point was to prevent people from firing 100s of tiny distractor missiles to protect their real missiles from AMS. So, if you want to do optimal damage now, you need to make all of your missiles strong, because distractor missiles just subtract from how many "real" missiles you can fire. Because each missiles has an absolute maximum of how much block damage it can do, and each additional missile costs more ammo blocks then the last, and because AMS can now prioritize heavy warheads, mixing smaller missiles with bigger ones is nerfed. While you have the option to loadout smaller missiles with bigger ones, you do so at a heavy cost. Adding an extra 1000ish blocks to go from 20 to 21 missiles is not a huge deal if that extra missile is a max-radius cruise missile, but if it's just a little 50 block sidewinder, and you need to add several of them to actually kill a fighter, then you are looking at a MASSIVE increase in ammo cost to gain the same weapon system that would be tiny if distributed on a couple of small interceptor drones.
You have concluded that biggest missiles only is the optimal strategy, and therefore this must be the intent of the designers despite them never having said so, and this is part of my whole point--Biggest missiles only should not be the optimal strategy.
Here's a more concise version of my point:
If a planet-buster can hit a target as if it were an anti-fighter missile, the calculus of battle in StarMade resolves to 'bigger is always better' and offers no interesting strategic or tactical choices beyond 'build the biggest ship you can and fire everything.'
Just because one must be economical with how they utilize missiles in combat does not mean that fighters have a magic shield against missile attack. Given the current mechanics, if someone wants to wipe a fighter off the board with a planet-buster that turns like a sidewinder, they still can do so with ease, especially if said planet-buster is a turret-mounted weapon.
You are still missing the point. Even if a big ship can one-shot a smaller ship, it still does not account for the disparity in numbers. Also, b-m are not an optimal anti-big ship weapon anyway. If you bring a big ship armed with doom beams/charge cannons/ arc beams etc vs a big ship armed with seeker missiles, the seeker missiles will be at a huge disadvantage because of how missiles scale. B-M stop being viable above medium weight classes now.
To prevent the game devolving into a mass-race, where the biggest ships always win with no viable counters save an equally-massed ship, the base turn rate of missiles should decrease as weapon damage increases in order to prevent missiles from being used in a fly-swatter fashion.
If system ratio is the difference between a Maverick and a Sidewinder, then my point is that weapon damage should be the difference between a Sidewinder and a Minuteman III.
My terms anti-fighter and planet-buster operate under the assumption of a lockon missile system with the same systems ratios but different sizes. One has ~100 blocks, the other has ~100,000 blocks.
What Coyote27 described makes it seem like the current system is working to ensure uniformity of missile behavior--as missiles go faster, they turn faster, meaning their turning radius remains the same and they don't overshoot their target, and as they go slower, they turn slower, keeping their turning radius the same.
A Minuteman III can't hit a fighter because it doesn't need to. It's a freaking ICBM. Instead of Sidewinder and a Minuteman III, think sidewinder and RIM-161. The RIM-161 is 16 times as massive as the sidewinder, but it is designed to intercept fighters, and it does that very well. The problem here is that you think that a big m-b is planet buster and it isn't. They are balanced for interception. Comparing a Sidewinder and a Minuteman III is like comparing a m-b to a m-m... they just aren't the same class of weapon system to begin with.
FYI, there is never a reason to make b-m more than about 1000 blocks anyway because of radius restrictions.
