Here's the math part. Included for those who care to know but don't want to work it out themselves, but the conclusion is negative size mod is a pain to bother working with.


Negative sizemod reduces the size of the component by the percentage of the hull size. Opposite of what a positive sizemod does.
So for example.
On a huge hull with no miniaturization you have 80 hull points, while a tiny hull gets 16.
A component with a size of 0 and a sizemod of 50 will take 40 hull points on a huge hull and 8 hull points on a tiny hull.
(0 + 80*0.50) and (0 + 16*0.50) respectively.
Sizemod in this case favors smaller hulls, and penalizes larger ones.

However with a size of 50 and a sizemod of -50 the same component will now take 10 points on a huge hull and 42 points on a tiny hull.
(50 + 80*-0.50) = (50 - 40) and (50 + 16*-0.50) = (50 - 8)
So now sizemod is favoring larger hulls.

You start to run into a problem with this solution however since you need to take miniaturization into account and in the above scenario if you get a hull with over 100 hull points, which is common, that same component will now take up 0 space.

I believe (read it somewhere) miniaturization is capped at 125% which gives the largest hull size possible of 180 hull points, while the smallest with that amount of miniaturization would be 36.

So to make a component completely unable to fit on a tiny hull but never reach a size of 0 you'd need to have a size > 36 and a sizemod > [-] size/180.

So for example.
If you make a component with a size of 50 then sizemod must be > (less negative than) -27 ([-] 50/180)
(50 + 180*-0.27) = (50 - 48.6) = a size of 1 or 2 depending on which way it rounds.
The minimum hull size that component could possibly fit on would be size 39 or 40.

More appropriate may be a size of 50 and a sizemod of -20 which would need at LEAST a hull with 42 or so hull points, would be size 36 on a huge hull and would be size 14 on a huge hull with full miniaturization.

Bottom line...this is a headache, and I don't think achieves what you're looking for.

Some sort of elegant solution is bound to reach up and bite the right person eventually.

...nibble, nibble...Hey!

The missile techs in an older version of the game (1.1?) were designed to be exactly the sort of weapon best suited for capitol ships. The way it worked was like this: The Size of the weapon was big, compared to guns or beams. But the SizeMod for the weapon was zero (it's gone up since that version), so the missile launchers didn't get larger like the beams and guns did.

My guess is the goal was on larger hulls, missiles would be the best choice as far as damage per hull space, but on smaller hulls the other weapons would be better. It would then be intelligent and proper to put the missiles on large ships, and beams/guns on smaller ships.

In the examples above, to make Black Hole weapons only for Huge hulls, change their size and sizemod values so that on anything less than huge, other weapons produce more damage per hull space. For Disruptors on Large (and above), make their size and sizemod so that other weapons (pre-disruptor beams and guns) are a better deal for anything smaller than Large. Note that if both of these techs are redesigned, Black hole weapons would have to be better than Disruptors on huge hulls.

And that's my favorite way to implement a rule: Leave it as a player's choice. Otherwise it ceases to be a game. It's also really cool, because that way stubborn, willful people can still go against the rules, build crappy little ships with Black hole guns, and then cry about how they do such a poor job in battle. While experience and understanding will get players who search for and implement the path of optimized design (your rules).

But is there a way to restrict things to smaller hulls only?

Very interesting information, egg. Thank you for posting that. I also found 50 and sizemod -20 to work ok, but definately not an elegant solution as you mentioned. I simply found that using a large base size and a small sizemod (ala missiles) seemed to work out the best for larger ships. In this way I have made custom energy weapons which work best on large or huge hulls.

On a huge hull with 144 possible points most missiles weigh in at 10-12 points while the energy and mass drivers are much larger. On Tiny hulls, the missiles are still about 8-12 points, but the energy and mass weapons are nearly half that on average. It works ok because it forces some compromise on smaller ships, but the standard tech tree makes arming huge hulls a no brainer, at least until the enemy starts using aereon missile defense in quantity. This is why I decided to make some custom energy weapons. I made a weapon called the GRASER Mk.I which falls in at Phasors III. It does 5 damage, has a base size of 10 and a sizemod of 2 and a cost of 90. Kind of an energy weapon answer to the nano ripper. There's a Mk.II which increases the damage to 7 points at Phasors VI and a Mk.III which raises damage to 13 at Disruptors III. Cost increases by 5 for each susequent mark.

Until it is possible to tie weapons and engines to power requirements, I don't see a good way to prevent someone from stuffing a capital class weapon into a tiny hull.