I'll throw some of my own thoughts into the ring, not that I haven't expressed any of these more than once already in other places.
- Price should never be the defining balancing factor. Having more credits than someone else shouldn't almost buy you an auto-win.
- The same goes for rebuy cost. It doesn't help you that for one death in a Vulture, you can afford to die many times in a Viper. Each death also destroys all your you combat bonds, bounty claims etc., so you cannot strategize around dying more often than someone with a bigger, more expensive ship.
- Speed and agility should roughly be higher the smaller a ship is. Yes, what I am saying is the smaller ships should be made faster. The Viper should reach a Cobra's boost speed (regular speed unchanged), the Eagle should have similar speed (at least what the Viper has now, with acceleration and deceleration increased accordingly so that it takes no longer than now to reach top speed or slow down again). The Sidewinder, Hauler and Adder all need to be faster, and probably deserve a boost to their jump ranges or the way mass (i.e. cargo) affects their jump range. Yes, an empty Hauler can jump 27Ly, but with cargo it just smaller distances than a Cobra with cargo, weapons and other equipment. And since the Adder is to have some sort of exploration focus, it may need a small boost to its jump range, too.
- One aspect about speed that is mentioned too rarely, imho, is not just the idea of escape or pursuit (both important things already), but that there exists a natural tactic against ships that are smaller and more fragile than you: backwards flying. Try it, take a Python, engage an Eagle, use backwards throttle, and just keep the Eagle in sight. It has no chance other than running away as soon as you implement this tactic (in which case it is hardly any faster than the mediocre speed of the Python). If it uses boost to get behind you, by the time it has slowed down again and turns around from its boosting, you have turned around, too, and are facing it again already. With sufficient non-boost speed, a small ship could overcome any backwards movement of a bigger ship in order to get out of the firing arcs of their fixed or gimballed weapons, and attack from the flank or behind.
- Outliers to the above rule (speed and agility being the exclusive domain of small ships) are fine, but need to be balanced by sufficient downsides. For example the Clipper, very fast and agile for its huge size, is a very fragile big target (both hull and shields), and has so weak vertical+lateral thrusters that it suffers from massive drift; by the time you have completed a regular 180° turn with FAON at 50% throttle, you see yourself going backwards and still decelerating. This is an example of how it is done right.
- Why is it that the Vulture, as a dedicated heavy fighter and big ship killer, also is the superior dogfighter against smaller ships, even smaller dedicated fighters? It makes no sense apart from some misplaced level-based linear progression thinking. And unlike the Clipper, all of its downsides - jump range, power starvation - are shared in equal or bigger proportion by the smaller ships.
- That some small ship may be deadly in a wing of four, is a strawman. A wing of four Vultures is still exponentially more deadly than a wing of four Eagles. The argument would only work if wings were not capped by ship count, but total ship value, so that for every Vulture one may have in their wing, you could also have multiple Eagles together taking up only a single slot. This however is impossible for a variety of gameplay and technical reasons, so the entire argument is moot. A ship must be valuable on its own.
- And example for perfect balance within the game is the Cobra vs Asp. The former is faster, and more agile, the latter is more heavily armed and protected, carries more cargo and has a bigger jump range. Each of the two ships has areas where it excels the other, while being not so extremely niche that having one of each ever appears mandatory.
- An idea for a game mechanic that might help give smaller an edge in a special way: limited reverse boost. An exclusive ability of only the retro-thrusters of smaller ships, a reverse-oriented boost function that also uses ENG power to rapidly slow down the ship to its current throttle setting. E.g. when flying an Eagle, you could boost past a ship to get behind it, then reverse-boost to quickly get back to the 50% throttle setting you still hold, turn around and immediately attack again where a bigger ship would still need time to bleed off speed before its velocity gets into decent maneuvering territory.
- Another idea - widen the blue zone of smaller ships, and have it stretch all the way out to their top speeds, so that they can maintain decent turn rates over a larger range of velocities than a bigger ship.
- Scanner visibility scaling with ship size in addition to heat is a nice idea, and definitely should happen both in normal space and supercruise.
- Weapon damage penalties versus bigger ship classes (small weapons: 66% vs large hulls, 33% vs medium hulls; medium weapons: 33% vs large hulls) are probably a mistake. They over-penalize the already significantly weaker weapons. In any case the current penalties are too big. Let's start with reducing them, for example to 20% and 40% respectively, and see how much that helps.
- If weapon damage penalties are there to stay, then we could have a form of an inverse, too. Why not arbitrate weapons by precision vs output? What I mean is, that small turrets and gimballed weapons should have a faster tracking speed than right now, medium should stay as is, large and especially huge weapons should have reduced tracking speed, so that, averaged out over time, a class 3 gimballed laser is no more effective attacking a Sidewinder, than a class 1 gimballed laser - the former hits harder when it its, the latter hits weaker but much more often. (This could also greatly incentivise using a small ship in your wing, to fend off other small and medium ships, as they could be more effective at that task than a bunch of large gimballed lasers mounted onto an Anaconda.) Fixed weapons could have better convergence the smaller the weapon class, with medium again staying roughly as is, large ones having significantly less, and huge weapons almost none at all.
