Browsing the forum I found that the size of jump engines is there that not every ship has one, but I feel it more means that larger jump engines are not used at all.
All jump capable ships are either jump scouts, survey vessels or tenders, it is very rare to see a true jump capable warship, which is kinda sad. Especially large capital ships should be the one where a jump drive is installed, but there it still uses up a lot of mass. For a proper squadron jump, the drive gets even larger, and much of it unnecessary, if you jump 10k escorts with a 50k battleship.
This all means it is easier to build a gate route for your assaults, which eliminates the need for jump drives completely, and sometimes gate routes already exist.
Jump drives really should make the difference between an offensive and a defensive fleet, and should sometimes even be found on civilian ships.
A few suggestions:
- Jump drives scale with a power law. A technobabble logical solution would be 3/2 (surface area of jump bubble.) Fixing size for a 100HS ship we would get: Jump Rating=(Drive Size*Drive Tech)^(3/2)*1/10 HS
- Allow more small ships to jump with a large tender. For example a 20k jumpship with squadron 3 rating would have a 60k tonnage cap, with no other ship larger than 20k, and maybe a limit to 3^2 ships. This would make capital jumpships with escort squadrons attractive.
- Eliminate commercial/military flag with a downtime vs jump rating parameter. You can increase the drive rating at the expense of longer periods of vulnerability. A freighter would have no problem waiting an hour to continue.
- Eliminate constructors and gates completely! (maybe they could show up as secret tech to be unlocked) This makes jump ferries and jump bases necessary, which do cost something, unlike jump gates, so you have to think where to plant them, and you can't use those of your enemies and they can be destroyed. It would also make it necessary to think if you want to use ferries, or equip your colony ships/freighters with jump drives instead. In ship design there should be a jump ferry flag, to mark such ships, so they can be used for route planning of civilians and your non-jump ships.