May I second the PDF question please.

Back to the original question:
No. There appears to be no special construction rules, other than phaser 4s cannot be mounted on ships.

No. There are no special base rules for game play.

That's from building some bases in the shipyard and getting the same point counts and reading the rules in KA and RA.

On the wider question of 'are bases worthwhile?'.
In the real world the balance between fixed defences and ships changes over time until at the beginning of the 20th century when small fast torpedo armed boats pushed the larger ships away from the coast, from a close blockade to a distant blockade. This generally rendering shore naval gun emplacements redundant. To a degree they are returning with shore based missile batteries having such massive range they are making those vulnerable small boats less attractive.

So in Starmada as always it depends on your setting.

PSYCO829 ,
True but hull has a direct if non-linear relationship to tonnage/SUs. Unless we of course decouple SU from Hull which is not a daft idea, thought it would made the gladiatorial  designers unmanageable the amount of hull is related to how 'big' it is.

Dan,
Yes you are right, but the SU ratio is actually worse. A minimum ship of 3 hull has 250.27 SU a ship 30 times bigger a WW1, Destroyer to Dreadnought, would have 7508.10 SU giving a Hull of just over 41 hull. Now that's hull size creep!

The relationship between a 10 and 20 hull are 1197.15 to 2947.74 just under 3 times.

So my original point about the need for very small ships I think still stands.

A follower of Mahan then sorry :? .

A WW1 fleet would not have cruisers in its battle line. Aside for the light cruisers squadrons at Jutland used for scouting the frigates of the sailing era and the attached light cruisers at Jutland were for communications, repeating flag signals from the admiral to their squadron. DN/BB/BC and DDs would have done most of the fighting.

Prompted by your hull sizes Beowulf, I've just done a very rough comparison between German, British, and US WW1 fleets and the displacement of a 'battleship' was about 30 times that of a destroyer. A destroyer of 10/10 should  compare with a DN of 300/300!  Hmmmmm.

Ah, words don't you love them. Ship classes change depending on setting. Take the Star Wars 'Star Destroyer' a dreadnought if ever I saw one :roll: . So really what they mean is up to you.

Historically the various terms have changed their meanings over time, with one era's Frigate is another era's Destroyer or in another a Cruiser. For example the term frigate had died out by the late 19th century and was reinvented post WW2 to describe a WW2 style destroyer while the term destroyer would more closely match a WW2 cruiser.

That being said I think there is some consensus, here is my take
Corvette - light and cheap escort vessel to guard convoys not expected to met enemy military vessels
Frigate - Heavier escort vessel rarely expected to be in a full battle (could also refer to a specialized escort vessel AAW or ASW for example)
Destroyer - Very heavy escort vessel  used to escort battle line ships in battle (a general escort vessel if frigates are specialists)
Cruiser (general) General workhorse (historically tended to operate far from home base. A sailing era frigate)
--Light Cruiser - lightly armed/armoured vessel (most often found in foreign stations)
--Heavy Cruiser - more heavily armed vessel (capable of being used as battle line substitute) 
Battle Cruiser - lightly armoured battleship
Battleship - the standard battle line ship able to both take and give out heavy damage 
Dreadnought - A more capable battleship (historically late era battleships)

Monitor- A heavily armed ship which has little or no maneuverability/speed. (Historically used for shore bombardment)

Of course everybody will have their own take on this and a perfectly reasonable justification for it.

BeowulfJB,
I agree with the view that its not the game that's broken but the way you play the game. Starmada is a construction kit to build fleets which match some form of background whether created by you or someone else. I know from other posts that competitive design is practiced by many others but that's not the strength of the game system.

Thanks, that fixes most of the errors .

However (sorry about this :roll: ) but there are a few issues.
1. The Gorn Jaws DD seems to have a typo in the Plasma G its different from all the other Plasma Gs
2. Assuming rounding errors account for most of the differences and ignoring less than 3% of points difference the following Romulan ships seem to vary more significantly from my calculations;

Type; My calc vs Book
War Eagle; 327 vs 306 = 6%
Battle Hawk; 251 vs 267 = 6%
King Eagle; 386 vs 402 = 4%
KR; 362 vs 380 = 5%
Skyhawk; 328 vs 348 = 6%

Most of the other ships including other Romulans are with in 3% so I don't think its a rounding error. The War eagle is the only one where I calculate a higher score than the book so is a further anomaly.