In the new system, being smaller than expected seems a much bigger problem for the enemy than being larger and more capable than expected, where it's currently more symmetrical. Gaining a range advantage with larger ships hinges on getting things exactly right, and may be near-impossible with a small tech disadvantage. Add cost considerations (which may translate into number of variants with different sensor configurations) and I see a race to the smallest practical craft. Stealth tech etc. will be an additional trump card eventually, but the game remains the same.
I'll have fun poking at things, looking for ways to defend against small craft without resorting to smaller craft will be an interesting challenge.
But things brought up as problematic in VB6 Aurora, like max-size fine-grained sensors, look less dominant and tend to be comparatively expensive in some way or other.
To be honest this is going to be more difficult and complex than it sounds. Sure... it is more expensive to build and research a bigger sensor but where do you put the boundary of too big and how small can you make them not to be detected by something bigger at longer range for a reasonable price. A really small fighter with a large res sensor can be detected at fairly long range now even with a sensor with quite a bit lower res than the size of that craft. If you have decent sized res 1 and say res 2, 6, 18, 80 sensors on say 750-1000t crafts then really small crafts can have trouble. You also can have 500t crafts easily outrange 150t scouts for a very cheap price.
So... where is the border and what is deemed too expensive, quality can be very important sometimes.
The point is to be cheap enough... then we also have passive sensors which also favours slightly bigger ships as well now with smaller signatures being easier to pick up.
Missile ranges is also going to be shorter.
This probably means that making your scouts too small can be dangerous so you might want to hedge with several types of scouting crafts of different shapes and sizes and base sensor resolutions on known enemy ship classes as much as possible.
Obviously keeping sensor system small means you can optimise them against enemy crafts more easily but that also has a price not only in resources but time to produce the ships and parts as well. If you need the system yesterday you need to use what you have. I think that keeping sensors at around 300-400t range should be affordable from a maintainability purpose and good enough to be competitive in most situations. But investing in some who are a bit larger could probably pay of as well. This would make mostly decently large fighters or FAC the best options for competitive scouting forces. It would not be prohibitively expensive to build and research a few 4-500t fighter classes with a wide array of resolutions.
This is also where my conversation on protecting scouts comes in. A small group of destroyers with hangars to house some different small scout crafts and good enough offensive fire-power can become very important. You will not scout with active sensors since they are easily detected with passives much further away than what they detect something. So once a scout is detected if you then have easy access to fire-power close by you can clear them out and withdraw the destroyers to a safe place, they might sometimes not even have been detected properly either, depends on the scout or scouts found I guess.
