I might be missing something, but here it goes...
So, I was playing my first game with the Iconians. I was building up my fleet for a final push to victory and desided to design my own large hull ship. After finishing and saving I noticed my newly designed ship had 1/4 of the attack power of the pre-desingned Destroyer. The thing is, I only had Kinetic Streams III researched and that particular Destroyer had 18 of them. With the hull being able to carry only under 100 weight units and the gun weighting 7, that seamed somewhat odd.
I ended up building one and now it has 19 kinetics, attack power of 21 and 2 ECM III's.
This is my second game of GalCiv so I might be just being noobish but hey...