I'm sure there are quite a few people on the forum who find the concept of massive fleets built around a limited number of large, powerful warships appealing. I'm also sure there are people who like the idea of Star Trek style independent long-range cruisers for exploration and expeditionary warfare. Unfortunately, though, the size of jump drives in the game makes it all but impossible to build ships with any kind of reasonable mission tonnage at low tech levels, when the game is most fun to play. Additionally, the cost of jump drives means that you always want to take maximum advantage of their capabilities, so any expeditionary group will end up comprising at least three or four vessels of a given tonnage, with one jump warship.
This is not ideal, but a simple change can rectify this. We already have self-only jump drives in the game, so why not extend that? A new technology, for about 5,000 RP, will allow jump drives to be marked as 'self-only'. This will cut their build cost and research cost by half, and their size by a third, but only allow them to jump the ship they are mounted on. An advanced version of this tech, for 20,000 RP, will cut it to a third and a fourth, respectively. Using regular jump drives will still be cheaper and more efficient when jumping squadrons of ships, so self-only drives will be strictly inferior for smaller vessels that are built in large numbers, for whom economies of scale make dedicated jump ships viable.