One question, Steve in your NATO Starting Force the Enterprise Carrier are a 48000 ton build.
My starting Navy shipyards have a capacity of around 10000, so I assume you didn´t care about your own building capacity when you created and build it for your starting setup? So, my question is, is it generally wise to design and create such ships for your staring setup?
Generally people only spawn in ships that they can actually make when starting the game, in a lot of the recorded games the starting conditions for the empires involved vary a lot from a default start, which is why you see some of those massive builds. This is especially true when part of the point of the story is a comparison of different design techniques.
I think that a respectable starting carrier can be made as low as 10000 tons assuming that it's nothing but a carrier and supply depot. Keeping the sensors and defenses on the rest of the fleet can really keep the mass down.
I generally start my carriers out at 16ktons to 20ktons, but I'm quite a bit of a turtler so my tech is generally pretty good before I start spreading my wings more.
