One observation I will make is that the higher bit count you have, the longer the game will take, just to physically move the models (or find the record sheets!); particularly if you're playing a game that has measured movement (as opposed to being hex based).
If you only have a 2 1/2-3 hour evening gaming slot at your club, there is a limit to how many ships you can field, regardless of rules.
There is also the point that the more abstract and simplified to make your rules to (presumably) make the death-count high to field lots of ships, naturally the less each individual ship then matters (and I then, to some extent, I start to question the point).
For myself, I wrote my own rules (over the course of the last fifteen years) – which I intend to publish eventually – which plays with around 20-30-odd bit-count per side* for an aforementioned evening's game (so like a fairly larger game of FT), but where even to smaller corvettes are more than just one-hit wonders and where manueuver is very important. for day game, obviously, you can afford to go bigger. The biggest we did was last year ar Recon…
…where we had about 100-odd ships on the board, which I think is close to a record for us.
As it was a convention, where we go primarily to talk to people, not to sit down and play hard, we only got a couple of bounds in, culminating in essentially only the first pass, where it got A Bit Messy…!
*Which is usually about 1/3 or less of an entire fleet (I have a LOT of fleets, though, given my 1300-odd starship collection!), allowing a fleet to be tailored to circumstance.
