Small ships

Another thought:
Big ship --> Production cost X, production time 
5 years, eats up one big shipyard slip for that 
length of time 
10 smaller ships --> Production cost X/10 
each, production time 1 year, eats up 10 
smaller shipyard slips but only for a year. 

At the end of one year, you've got 10 small 
raiders or escorts ready to replace losses. He's 
got half the hull on his BB. Who'll win that fight? 
Attritional warfare such as occurs in most major 
conflicts inevitable makes small ships more 
common as they are quickly produced 
replacements, and large ships are very valuable 
because if you lose one, you have  a loss for a 
long (in war terms) time. You may be able to 
throw the money at the problem and have the 
slip space, but a big ship can only go up so 
fast, and that means it will take longer than an 
equal mass and cost of smaller ships. So, 
you've got a strategic deployment issue. 

I think Weber hit on this somewhere in one of 
his novels where they didn't want to deploy 
Adm. White Haven and the Home Fleet to 
someplace because the consequences of losing 
it would be horrid. They just couldn't risk losing 
the big battlewagons. Similarly, I think England 
has had this kind of issue many times over the 
centuries. I suspect smaller ships have done 
combat many times when bigger ships could 
have fought, if the consequences of losing the 
big boys hadn't been deemed too dire.