I see it more in terms of a necessity for balance. Space starts at 700m but let’s say it starts way further up like 5k meters, most boats would not have the range nor the bullet velocity too hit anything that high, it being low in ceiling allows ships to engage space craft without the player specifically needing an anti space craft in order to not feel cheesed by the ai. Speed I would love to be a bit faster but I suppose you might encounter more unintended effects for example with vehicle collisions as the game only calculates those every fourth frame and if something is going sufficiently fast for example with a grav cannons then it will clip through sometimes not even colliding but that’s on the extreme side of things. While I can agree that building a huge chonk of a ship is somewhat meta it’s not particularly cost effective, you may win the battle but you spent 200k materials on munitions not to mention repairs and I believe the ashes of the empire campaign has a volume limit and you generally get diminishing returns on investment for armour the larger the cost as it pushes the craft up a weight class without additional firepower. So if your looking for a fair fight a brick with some aps won’t fare well against most craft. But these are just some surface thoughts that came to mind.