[@thewizardguy] I'd rather not have my fleet fodderized as it takes a hell of a lot of ships to keep up a basic patrol of the solar system. There's so many ships because the frontier is the entire Oort Cloud and outer solar system, which is a lot of space. Furthermore, compared to everyone else's equipment, they're as weak as can be. Then to top it off, they can't communicate across the solar system without at least tens of minutes of delay, and they can't travel anywhere without a gravitic drive, which is only present in the battleship, supercarrier, carrier, and dreadnought. I imagined the fleetcomm center orbiting Jupiter would be brought along for the ride so that the entire fleet isn't sent into disarray, too.

Also, btw, a patrolboat is a 5 person vessel. The most a vessel holds is 1,500, and that's the supercarrier. 99% of their size just comes from holding missiles.