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Is it just me or is selecting a ship role completely arbitrary and has no effect on how the ship acts, what the ship is capable of, how strong, big or have any effect on any other factor? Does it have any effect what so ever on the ship other than what the warning section says you need or should have?

i can design the exact same escort ship as a i do capital ship and the ONLY difference is on the Capital ship warnings where suggests i add a troop module.

so if there is no point why have it? I would expect a capital ship would just be larger in physical size perhaps giving it a stronger hull, make it have more mass and volume and maybe move slower and be a bit harder to kill.

I find this very irritating.

So am i mistaken or is there more to selecting a role of a ship OTHER THAN the display in the warning section and the requirements (such as a carrier needs to be 40% fighter bays). but really i can make a same size escort ship with 40% fighrer bays right?

If you browse the forums here a bit, you'll find numerous discussions on this topic. I won't reproduce those here, just a quick two cents:
- Interpretation 1: The various roles and subroles are heuristic devices for your convenience, nothing more. You make small ones, and you know those are throwaway; you see enemy small ones, you know he's scouting / escorting, not seriously threatening. I like to build a bunch of ships < destroyer sometimes, just feels better.
- Interpretation 2: While a "bigger" ship might be "better" in a fight, they might not be "better" all the time; the smaller ones might be "better" for escorting, scouting, harrassing; at least economically speaking, if resources were ever an issue (sadly, they are not), but building time may sometimes be.