Hmm. Mommy-state and Daddy-state. The Ying and Yang of how we control ourselves. Or, would that be better described as "Bi-polar"?

I'm going to have to look up my old copy of that. That story stirred a few dregs of xenophobia in me. A ring of rocks around the solar system; just perfect for flinging onto a world. In a few centuries, we may have that ability.
 
Now i'm really scared...

Or turn it into an art installation. Get someone old school like Andy Warhol. If you got someone modern they *would* paint them like dicks.

Thank you. I needed that.

I'll find you a link to a video of the posting.

And how about a battleship in space? Or a train in space? It reminds me of our patent office, where any everyday thing "but on the internet" gets you a shiny new long number.

C.J. Cherryh has a universe of space stations and ships. While reading one of them, I enjoyed the realistic depiction of life aboard a corvette. I eventually came to realize that it was a lot like the books I've read about life aboard sailing man-o-wars. Which makes sense, as the parallels are there, and she's just describing how a lot of humans react in the same situations.

In one of Larry Niven's books, a small group of protectors have a space battle that takes months, as they don't have FTL. He compresses the hell out of the timeline and makes it interesting, of course, including a slingshot maneuver around a neutron star.

Sounds good, and that's more or less the way ships are really designed. Instead of a points pool, there's the budget and resources. Whether or not they're called classes, you're going to have a largest and a smallest. Once you have that, you can have something in the middle. With more fine tuning one ends up with a small-medium group, and a medium-large, for certain mission types or budgets. So I think your 5 groupings is spot on.

Regarding designers doing dumb things, history is littered with "classes" of only one or two ships. And, of course, we can't always blame the designers; often they're directed to do things that they do by other people/organizations.

Good luck with your game.

My 2nd thought was that this looks like a field of dicks. It may be a way to win over powerful nimby types who look and find that there's something, er, aesthetically pleasing about them.

Coming, This October...

  "Field of Dreams 2"

Streisand effect: let's see how many mj references we're going to get now because of the AC's mini-rant. Conversely, perhaps he's a tokin' troll.

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"

"Googles regular search has turned to shit. Even bing is better." I have the opposite experience.

Pretty much.