I've been obsessive about science fiction, space ship construction systems, since the days of first edition Traveler's High Guard (a good thirty five years ago). I've also extensively read up on military history and the strategy of war for most of the last forty years as well as playing countless wargames, many of which had rule books inches thick and whose paper hex maps covered ping pong tables. I've now played Starmade enough I think to have a very good grasp of the size of ships people build and fly, and the progression of those ships.
I've also noticed a great deal of ambiguity in people's references to ship classifications. This is understandable, given that (for among other reasons) there is in fact today in our modern navies, a regrettable level of similar ambiguity, with cruiser sized ships being called frigates for reasons solely to do with political funding. As much for my own sake, I've decided to write down how I personally classify ships in Starmade. If others find this classification listing useful, all the better.
Snub Fighter - Runabout 0-100 Mass
Generally ships in this range are useless in a fight and might as well be left unarmed.
Light Fighter/Fighter/Heavy Fighter 100-1K Mass
Most pirates fall into this range. Light fighters on the low end of this scale are typically expendable harassers meant to do little more than distract turrets for a short period of time. On the heavier side, we find ships that can start to be a threat in numbers to larger ships.
Corvette 1K-2K Mass
At this scale we find ships able to stand up to and dispatch a typical pirate attack. This would be the standard ship for picket (sensor) duty. A pirate at this scale would probably be the flagship for their operation. Point defense turrets start to become standard.
Frigate 2K-5K Mass
The ship of choice to bring the fight to pirates. This ship can reliably engage such threats without risk of damage. At this scale we start to see small offensive turrets.
Destroyer 5K-10K Mass
A military work horse, can carry weapons that can be a threat in major fleet engagements, though it's life expectancy should it be targeted in such engagements is very short. Ships of this class can be used to bring down typical pirate stations.
Light Cruiser/Cruiser/Heavy Cruiser 10K-50K Mass
These tend to be the ships of choice for most players to actually fly about. Ships smaller than this are simply too easy to destroy and ships much larger tend to present issues with extremely sluggish turning, excessive power requirements, slow jump recycling and low thrust to mass ratios. Turrets start to be major portions of the ship's offensive capacity.
Battlecruiser 50K-100K Mass
This is the tweak class, the weight that most ship builders can obsess over forever. Well built ships at this scale can have the handling characteristics of the lighter cruisers while still having significantly better defense and firepower. The downside is that the material cost of them can be too high to casually risk.
Battleship 100K-500k Mass
This is the ship people start to build to be the big stick for their faction. Huge resources are expended to create a ship that for the most part, simply stays docked. It's movement characteristics are such that it is no fun to fly, and is brought out only if there is a major fleet engagement to fight. However even this ship is potentially outclassed and players may at some point cannibalize it for the building of something even bigger.
Titan 500K Mass+
This is the true war fighting pinnacle. It represents the ultimate offensive and defensive capacity of a faction. Most factions will have only one Titan, if they have any at all. There is no upper limit to a Titan's potential mass. The real limit is the fact that deploying a titan in battle (depending to a degree upon how it was built) could well crash some servers.
Three putative ship classifications are notably not in this list, that of Dreadnought, Capital Ship and Carrier.
Dreadnoughts are simply battleships. The term was used originally for a ship class the British came up with which obsoleted the battleships of their day. New battleships were promptly designed and built which obsoleted the dreadnoughts. A player building a battleship in the weight category above could legitimately call their ship a dreadnought instead, if they felt their ship was of a design that would force other similarly sized ships to be redesigned.
Capital Ships are not a ship class per say. A capital ship is a ship the owner cannot afford to lose. As such the term is completely subjective. A starting player's small miner may be their only resource and as such, for them at least, their 'capital ship'.
Carrier is also not a ship class, but rather a type of ship. It is perfectly possible for a cruiser sized ship to be a carrier, just as much as a titan could be a carrier.
