Something occurred to me, and I wanted to check with the forum to see if there's a problem in the logic.
RFC has posted that the LD's are capital ships and that they are intended and expected to be able to stand up to other people's capital ships. "Stand up to" in terms of "blow away with impunity because they cannot be seen" isn't an impossible reading, but it has seemed forced. On the other hand, with no wedge, no sidewalls, no bubble wall, no buckers, and pokey speed, it's been hard to see how they can defend themselves effectively, or even run for it in many circumstances, if they are detected.
Here's where the question comes up: is there any reason they can't manage a stand-up fight, if it comes to that, on account of being just ridiculously huge, with far more armor, particle shielding, electronic warfare systems, active defenses, and possibly decoys, than any impeller drive starship?
Impeller drive starships are size capped, more or less, by the inertial compensator and how its efficiency plummets over 8.5 million tons or so. Bigger than that, and you're a pokey fortress: technically mobile but really just enough for slight maneuvering and (e.g.) frustrating ballistic missile shots.
Spider drive starships, however, aren't using an inertial compensator. They're just using massive grav plating, and if there's any reason to think that grav plating suffers an efficiency plunge with too much of it, I'm not aware of it, and even if there is, it may not be at as "low" a tonnage as the inertial compensator. Similarly, the proportion of a unit dedicated to a hypergenerator seems to go down with tonnage, though absolute tonnage on it will go up still with more tonnage. So the hypergenerator isn't putting a cap on it. (If other navies had a compelling reason to, they could presumably build a hypergenerator into a fortress and call it a monitor perhaps - but it'd blow chunks for combat with its lousy speed and lack of stealth.)
Two other indirect reasons to think the LD's may be really, really large:
Sharks are 4 million tons and were never meant to be deployed operationally - they were meant as pure proof-of-concept models. 4 million tons still isn't small. If practical, you'd want to prove the concept with a full-size model. If the LD's were only 8 million tons or so, a full-size model would have been quite practical: longer to build than the Shark and more expensive, granted, but not so much so that you'd opt out of getting something that would be a perfect model and, incidentally, an actual instance of the class intended for use. This suggests that LD's are much larger still, and the 4 million ton Shark represents a much smaller fraction of the build time and expense of a LD.
Relatedly: LD's are taking a long time to build. It's mentioned repeatedly, but the Shark's don't seem to be just off the ways either, and if the LD's would only take a bit longer than Sharks to build - say, 12-18 months more - I would have thought some of them would have been completed by (e.g.) the after-action review of the Sharks following OB.
One last meta reason: ridiculously large Leonard Detweiler SD's, drifting invisible through space, ready to do the bidding of evil overlords, would be wonderfully ominous. It's not a reason to build them that way for the Alignment, but it may be a reason for RFC to make things so that the Alignment has reason to build them.
