Swatting a fly with a sledgehammer is wasted overkill. And this applies even to corvette class ships.



If you know how many hit points your opponant has, then the ideal design for a ship is to deliver that amount of damage, plus a buffer of maybe 30% for chance cards and other randomness.



I've been working on a weapon table that lists number of each weapon to kill a given hit point ship size, under ideal conditions, and it's helped me design a few ships. Perhaps you will find it useful as well.



Weapon counts table