The problem I have with \"big ships are bad now\" complaints is that a -lot- of people saw big ships as being all the game could be about before the nerf. In fact, many still feels it\'s the call.
Feel free to whine about \"but realism\"(despite the fact that the game does not fully apply it in the first place... else your ship would never slow down unless asked to when letting go of acceleration, due to the lack of friction in space). Or feel free to whine about \"but this is space fiction, who cares. Ships can carry shields and such\".
However think of this aspect. Introducing drawbacks specific to big ships introduces one aspect critical to many games which, personally, I feel would incredibly benefit this game.
It introduces ship roles.
Let\'s run a small simulation of potential changes.
Say that missiles are finally tweaked so they don\'t utterly annhilate ships when they break through shields. Say that they still deal very high damages to break through plating but in a much more localized area, in a fashion that only truly large missiles can really make explosions that are truly a large threat in and for themselves... and even there still be not as bad as they used to be.
Say that armor is finally a fair bit thougher, so it becomes again another option than just purely trusting in shields... who with this change, who knows, might even let say 10 or 20% of weapons damages through. In fact, they might even become customizable so that a player could adjust shield strenght, shield regen and shield resistance(how much damage filter through a shield) for a greater variety of protection design.
Now, let\'s imagine that mass also dragged down one\'s top speed(perhaps to a max of 40km/h for properly setup ships), but that weapon sizes greatly increased damages and range(the later perhaps even beyond current levels), though at the cost of a slower reload speed(to represent the larger size of ammunition or power charge needed to handle).
Now increase ship max speed in a fashion that ships of a smaller mass(with proper dedicated engine blocks ratio to mass) could reach a speed of 65km/h(say 15 km/h over the current top speed, and still only 25 km/h than the max speed attainable by capital ships). Maybe do a similar thing for weapons so that they start with a good firing rate that lower only as size(and thus damage and range) are increased, though this could be slightly offset by current.
And say, add a system of \"FTL generators blocks\" that allow ship to jump, but whose power consumption is such, or range is affected by mass in such a way that only capital ships can jump to appreciable(if not literally impressive) range with it.
What you could see is a situation where defined possibilities for ship \"roles\" could exist. A bit like a real life navy(please don\'t bring up \"but this is space, we can move in the Z axis! It\'s not the same\" arguments. It\'s also a game and by default as such will never be like realistic spaceship simulation. So can the physics go).
You could see smaller crafts taking the roles of \"strikecrafts\". Fighters and bombers, able to go easily on planet surfaces(as the mass system already favors) for approach or strafing and bombing runs on enemy instalations, or only to be used as shuttles of larger ships. They could still be able to deal decisive damages to capital ships(especially if dedicated weapons like shield busters or such are ever implemented) thanks to their maneuverability making them able to outmaneuver them and their smaller size making them easier to produces... however their damages due to the smaller area of effect of their weapons would be a more localized affair. They wouldn\'t \"win\" against a capital ship by blowing it in it\'s entirety, but crippling systems like exposed weapons or engines(the HMS Bismark in WW2 was made useless for all measures of the term by a single seaplane\'s torpedo blowing up it\'s rudder).
They would, however, be fragile and still easily destroyed by weapon, especially since their smaller mass means they would have much less layer of armors to protect their essential systems.
Now on the other extreme, capital ships would still carry layers upon layers of armor. Unless using concentrated strikes at specific components, especially against a larger ship, strikecraft would be able to do very little. Similarily, especially for a ship with enough dedicated anti-strike craft turrets and weapons positions(something which would encourage capital ship to be used more often as \"units\" crewed by multiple people rather than a lone person, like any extremely large vehicle or contraption, due to sheer complexity alone), a lone fighter rushing a capital ship should still be a very dangerous deal(unless said ship is one of the ultra-specialized \"ship-around-a-single-gun\" deal).
Now only that, but their larger weapons would be able to deal extreme damages, at range much beyond that any strikecraft could attain with their own weapons(to use the example again, the Bismark was nonetheless rightfully feared for it\'s ability to strike down merchants ships not from hundred or thousand of feets away, but literally miles away from itself). A since the longer ranged weapons are also the bigger ones, these are the ones which would deal even more damage... making capital ships more or less like still extremely feared heavily armored snipers offset only by a relatively lower firing rate... that is, if they decide to specializes in this \"role\".
For that\'s just two roles, two extremes. A relatively large frigates might decide to forego the use of large unwieldy guns in favor of arrays of small and medium guns built across it\'s hull and in turrets, to actually specializes in anti-strikecraft \"roles\" via the sheer amount of still-threatening(for small ships) projectiles they could throw... while another might decide to use most of it\'s mass for a single set of direct firing large anti-capital ship weapons, becoming more or less a \"ship around a gun\" at the cost of becoming extremely vulnerable to strikecrafts without escort.
And add in, as mentionned earlier, an FTL system that can only be efficiently used by the larger ships and suddenly docking smaller ships to a bigger one makes even greater sense, as though fighters are the ones with the higher short-range mobility, in the truly long range it is they who now find themselves \"depending\" on the larger ships.
And in my eyes, both creativity and gameplay would benefit from this, for it would encourages greater interactions between players of different size classes, and with a wider spread of possibilities going both ways, would even bolster player creativity in my eyes as it would leave even greater possibilities for players to come up with their own original design ideas and develop \"their\" own roles for a ship especially with ships designs and progression now then going in more than a single, \"build big\", way.
This is just something that I would like many players to keep in mind. We all have our own visions of what the game should be, but we should recall it\'s exactly that... a game, and there\'s reasons many games have this kind of \"balancing\" so as to encourage a more diverse environment to try to bring in as diverse a set of player, since the more players means the greater a game\'s success is.
The last thing we want it an environment where a \"build big\" elitism dominates, where the only players \"worthy\" of considerationz are those who had the time and patience to build ships that are miles longs.
This is minecraft in space, folks. The last thing we want this to become is another World of Warcraft where the only players worth of notices are those who\'ve had time to grind to level 80(or whatever the level cap is nowdays) and speny months-long subscriptions and everyone else below this level might as well not exist for not having \"proven\" themselves yet worthy of \"fun\".
Is that the experience we want? A game where we\'re only worthy of having an actual impact and \"fun\" only if we had time to grind to level 80 and raid dungeons dozens upon dozen of times for the best gear and where everybody else is nonconsequential until they\'ve grinded to that level... assuming they don\'t give up long before that from lack of patience.
