- a 3000 cannon block system
- a 5000 warp drive system
- a 2000 missile system
- a 4000 block ion system
You're looking at 14k blocks before you even start in on power, storage, hull, shields, etc. Thats already a fairly decent sized ship to start with.
But thats not the point. I'm not saying everyone is going to fly around in a titan just for the hell of it, I'm saying realistically someone who is used to making X sized systems is going to keep making them that size, and add the crew stuff on top of that. Most people are not going to sit down and do the math to find break even points, they're going to build an acceptable system and then add the crew bonus on top of that.
I'm saying someone that would have built a 50k block ship might now be building a 55k block ship, not that they're going to suddenly make million block sector spanning mega titans.
Larger doesn't mean an order of magnitude larger, it just means bigger than they would have built had crews not existed.
More blocks being added means more blocks to put on your ships, which means bigger ships to carry all of those new blocks.
Because unless there is an active punishment to building bigger, nobody is going to try to juggle everything and put in a lot of extra work to break even with what they could do faster and easier in the same space by just dropping more systems.
And thats the key, really.
The crews are going to have to give bonuses that cannot be replicated by simply piling in more of the base system. They can't be "20% more damage", because then one of two things will happen. They will either be more efficient than the base system, which means they become 100% mandatory for anyone that cares about building an efficient ship, or they will be even/less efficient and they won't get used due to their added complexity.
They're going to need to offer us something we can't get any other way, or offer us something that simply refines or makes something we can already do easier.
Example:
Crew increasing weapon damage? Nope, thats either going to be ramping up the power curve, or its going to be ignored. Crew on a weapon system allowing it to be fired as if another player were in that computer, giving you an effect more like a fixed turret? Now thats useful and something we can already do either by having friends or by switching between cameras/arrays manually. It would just be easier with a crew.
Crew making a salvage beam more efficient? Not really much point when its easier to just build a bigger array. Crew that would automatically sort your stuff for you, or even man salvage turrets? Now that would be more useful.