When I say "lack of meaningful distinction between ship size classes", I mean exactly that, not "lack of meaningful distinction between ships".
A Sidewinder and an Anaconda are different ships with different capabilities, sure, but those capabilities fall within a fairly narrow range:
- cargo capacity, the biggest difference [1], is 30x
- firepower and defence is less than 10x as a raw value (though the Anaconda can stack SCBs and engineered SBs in a way that the Sidewinder can't on the defence side, but it's hard to argue that's a positive feature)
- speed is much less than 2x difference (unless the Sidewinder has enhanced thrusters, and even then only 3x)
- turning rate is about 2x difference
- the parts for the two ships are inter-compatible to a very high extent. Downsizing most of an Anaconda's internals to Sidewinder-class is often done intentionally to improve exploration performance. Baseline power generation is only 4x different [2] to allow more use of this.
The Anaconda is essentially just a big Sidewinder, which is why "you can do anything in a Sidewinder [3], why do you need a bigger ship?" is a meme in these parts. Indeed, you can do slightly more in the Sidewinder, because it can land anywhere. The Anaconda can do a bunch of things more effectively ... but not that much more effectively, especially if it's not hauling cargo.
For a game with a meaningful distinction between size classes, the old Tie Fighter or Freespace games - or for a modern equivalent, the X series. A Star Destroyer is not just a big Tie Fighter with a bit more armour that takes slightly longer to turn corners. The difference between the largest and smallest X4 ships is around 100x on cargo capacity and damage resistance, 10x on speed and agility, somewhere in-between on damage output, and the equipment is mostly not cross-compatible (though that's less important because the outfitting model is a lot simpler anyway) ... and the price difference is somewhere around 100x as well..
I'm not saying every space game needs a strong size-class distinction - you can get much more interesting mass combat scenarios when there is, but for something like ED which tends towards 1-on-1 dogfights anyway it's probably better not to because 1v1 cross-size contests tend to be too predictable. The context of me pointing out the lack of size-class distinction was that ED has ships which don't have it, priced as if they do ... and this makes earnings balancing virtually impossible. By capabilities relative to the Sidewinder, the Anaconda should cost maybe a million credits for the basic hull (as it did in FFE!), and then the historic 1.0 earning rates for various activities would have made reasonable sense.
[1] Not counting the 4750x difference in price here, which is the actual problem.
[2] Which, in one of EDs many realisms, means that 4 Sidewinder-class 2A power plants connected in parallel have slightly higher output than the Anaconda's 8A plant for less than a tenth of the mass, have better combined integrity, etc. etc. You just can't actually do that because reasons.
[3] Yes, not literally true since it doesn't have medium hardpoints and is short a few utility mounts. Diamondback Scout, though...
