What follows is more of an opinion question than me wanting a rulebook answer... I'm looking more at individual perspectives.

I have seen some suggestions of requirements for increasing levels of Pilot skill being necessary (or legally required, which may be different yet somehow related) for increasingly large vessel tonnages.

What do you think of that requirement as a game mechanic or as a certification factor for in-game certifications?

I see two sides and hereafter are the arguments (individually, I do not claim they represent but one homongeneous set of ideas - pro or con) I see:

CON:

- Ship control is largely computerized. You could fly one with a mouse or a touchscreen and you say 'go there' and the ship's software makes that happen, be the ship a small trader or a giant battlewagon.

- If you are a trained pilot, you can adapt to any size of vessel in a reasonable time frame and that doesn't imply you need to be vastly better (higher skill)

- The thruster technologies scale with size/mass, and thus issues of momentum and inertia are not any worse on a larger vessel than on a smaller one (and any issues of interior ship balance is handle during loading and in flight by ship computers)

PROS:

- Larger ships are worth more money and more people are aboard usually, so the loss of a big ship is much worse than the loss of a small ship so, although the control of the ship is manageable by less skilled pilots, the odds of incident go down with better pilots so it is a legal/certification/insurance requirement (vs. a technical limitation)

- Larger ships have many more moving parts (human, computer, etc) than smaller ships and this requires a lot more coordination, discipline and judgment as ship sizes get larger, so pilot skills must climb to match the increased difficulty (True on real world tall ships and modern naval vessels, though moreso on the tall ships - forex in Tall Ships, docking under sail requires a lot of teams to be well drilled and coordinated and the officer calling the timings and actions had best have very good judgment, and forex #2 - modern naval ships - when you go to navigate a pass (Active Pass on Vancouver Island comes to mind), there are actions that begin as far as 1500m out, then 1100m, then 8000m, etc. that different bridge officers need to take and crew following, with the tempo going up the closer you get to initiating the turn).

- Larger ships have much greater mass, are more ponderous, and thrust technologies do not keep up (for a variety of possible reasons) so the larger ships have to be much more careful about approach speeds during docking, balance on takeoff and dynamically in transit, of entering orbit correctly, and so on so there is a need for more skilled judgment and a more deft touch with larger vessels (thus higher skill levels needed from a pilot) (This is somewhat true in the real world - a modern supertanker can take 20km of ocean to decelerate to a stop from cruising speed!)

(That latter ponderousness also would affect 'rules of space' (rules of the road in space) as to right of way - on water it tends to the larger giving way to the smaller if the smaller are under sail and the larger under power but that just makes life more exciting for ship captains if there are idiots in smaller boats depending on the rules of the road vs. the laws of physics)

Are there any other arguments one way or another?

Stylistically, I like the Age of Sail or WWI aspect where smaller vessels are more nimble and usually can accelerate and decelerate faster and manouver with much more fluidity (and some designs are just plain fast as the only way they can survive) vs. the larger battlewagons are ponderous to turn, decelerate much slower and accelerate somewhat slower and are generally less maneuverable than the little vessels.

Yet: For all their size, a larger keelboat will have a higher average speed than a smaller keelboat for reasons of hull / water dynamics. A 150' racing sailboat is much, much faster than a 28' racing sailboat. And the US CVNs can steam away from their sea-borne escorts if they want to - they can really move. And in space, rotating your battlewagon for a shot, given longer space combat time frames and the lack of a resistant medium, can be fairly straightforward and accomplished in reasonable amounts of time, unlike trying to pivot the US Missouri like it had modern bow thrusters from keelboats...

I'm curious how people see large ships vs. small ships in space and how they might choose to represent that in their space games - maneuverability as one part, and whether the pilots need to be a lot more skilled to handle much larger ship sizes...

TomB

“The only stable state is the one in which all men are equal before the law.” ― Aristotle