EG Space Ship Log Entry (Patreon)

Sentient species have been traveling space for thousands of years, though across races and time there have become a norm for classifying ships.

Classes

Fighter - 1-2 passenger military vessel

Shuttle - 6-12 passenger vessel not intended for combat scenarios, though come in an innumerable number of varieties.

Corvette - Smallest craft intended to travel from planet to planet. Can range from 60-120m in length. If heavily armed at the cost of defense and speed, it may be referred to as a gunboat.

Frigate - 100-200m in length is the bread and butter of every military fleet. Commonly seen on patrols and non-urgent scouting missions.

Destroyer - 150-300m in length, for most missions against pirates a destroyer will solve the job on its own. May often be seen with a small company of corvettes around it in battle scenarios.

Battleship - 250-500m in length, a battleship is incredibly dangerous. Though it may only be twice the size of a frigate, it likely has double the decks and wider as well. Meaning a battleship can easily end up being eight times the ship of a frigate. That's almost a whole magnitude larger on the low end and that means ten times the space to accommodate power, weapons, shields and drives.

Capital Ship - Over 500m in length, there is no upper end and oftentimes particularly large ones are referred to as 'dreadnaughts' however that isn't a technical class of ships. Almost all capital ships will have a fighter contingent as well as smaller ships accompanying them. Capital class ships can have over a thousand personnel on board to keep them running and are akin to a small city.

Drives

Sublight - It can come in many forms, oftentimes a propellent is expelled from the rear of the ship and ignited to generate thrust. These are simple drives, yet oftentimes can take a bulk of the physical structure.

Hyperdrive - All ships intended to travel between start systems are equipped with Hyperdrives and they were until recently the best way to travel. To initiate hyperdrive, the ship must be traveling with enough momentum that they can enter hyperspace stably and continue forward. Hyperspace is a compressed separate space from nominal reality and it's discovery and subsequent development in the universe is based off several native creatures in the galaxy, one of which being Dragons who have an innate ability to enter hyperspace.

JACK - The Juler–Kurtz Addressable Cerebral Knot (JACK) system, is a new invention less than a decade old in it's commercial form. It relies on a large burst of power as well as fine calculations requiring accurate models of the space you're intending to occupy in order to initiate paracausal fold travel. An instantaneous form of travel that is no doubt to revolutionize the galaxy in the coming years.

Power Management

Though as ships grow larger in size they often have multiple power stations within the ship. In combat or other intense scenarios how the constantly generated power is used is very important. Ignoring things we want to constantly be on like life support, a ship may have the capacity to use 5 units of power for drives, 4 units for weapons and 4 units for shielding. Yet the ships total output may only be 10 units at any one point in time.

By overengineering systems to the power a reactor can supply is a positive. This allows for any ship to adjust its power outputs to optimize its systems for a large variety of challenges rather than just building a system that operates all sections at full power, but is inflexible to many difficulties.

There may be many scenarios where you wish you had more than shielding than weapons after all.

Also your lovely author is a longtime FTL player :p power management is KEY!