[@DracoLunaris][@Alfhedil]

there's also the fact that making arks could be considered massively wasteful as well, especially considering how *easy* they'd be to hit, and the massive amount of logistics and architecture that'd be required to make such a massive construct that wouldn't fall apart if a single part of it started moving. After all, a normal starship sitting on the ground would probably tear itself apart, if only for the fact that you only need to build the structure around the center of mass and wherever the propulsion is, versus the entire structural integrity that's required of an aircraft or naval ship, because of the immense pressure that the entire thing receives from *gravity*.

Colonizing planets would be cheaper bro. 

Furthermore, you'd have to have some really good defensive measures in place. Something so large, again, would be really easy to hit. A fleet sitting twenty lighthours away could just fire thousands of railguns and mass accelerators. It'd be extremely hard to detect inanimate, unpowered, ballistic projectiles of such small size. The difficulty and cost of setting up a defensive sensor grid to detect and eliminate any such projectiles, natural or fired from a hostile weapon, would be expensive.

I'm no GM, these are just my thoughts on it. This is also soft scifi, so being as realistic as possible isn't a necessity. Just my take on things. You do you bro