Yes, in games and in fiction you can technically attach anything to anything.haravikk wrote:Technically you could attach any size weapon to any sized ship.
But we don't want to destroy the user's sense of disbelief. It would be very hard to convince someone that you can attach to a ship something that's twice as large as it and that needs four times as much power -- and then still be able to operate the ship as before without awesome amounts of technology. At the very least you'd need something like what Zpock pointed out.
Your favouring smaller ships vs. larger ships in some respects and larger ships in others, is in keeping with the ideas discussed earlier in this thread.
Mass is negligable in a space game that doesn't want to be bothered about gravity. As far as I know, gravity isn't going to be modelled in FreeOrion but it has been used to explain/justify concepts when brainstorming. The latter is true in several posts in this thread.haravikk wrote: But erm yeah, IMO in a space game mass is negligable, except in terms of engines getting a thing to move.
That's a good term for it. Everything like power, hull strength, mass, and space needed being abstracted into "structure points". Then mounting a weapon would cost/require X structure points.haravikk wrote:Maybe a better word would simply be structure points
I assume that refitting is already included as part of FreeOrion (a more informed poster would know otherwise). Anyway, refitting wouldn't restrict fleet-size per se. It's just as likely to lead to *larger* fleets.haravikk wrote: Back onto similar fleet sizes though, I guess part of this could depend heavily on the economics of it. If refitting is a good solution
As you mentioned, refitting out-dated ships to update them to the current designs, tends to be cheaper than scrapping the old ship and building a newer model from scratch. So it is more efficient to update your current fleet by re-fitting each ship than to scrap it and build a new one. You could then use the saved production time/points on other projects including more ships. That's how I've always seen it used by players. The maintenance costs that you mentioned would be more of a hindrance to fleet sizes.
I agreed with pretty much everything else in your post, though.