The smallest ship I can make depends on a variety of factors. I like Honorverse ships (the canon ones anyway, the Evergreen Studios redesigns don’t really float my boat) because they’re fairly simple shapes, so I could probably get a LAC down to a couple inches long, but then SDs/CLACs might end up being the size of one of my shelves, and a heavy merchantman might overflow one of my desks. 😆

Probably what I would want to do for a papercraft ship game or series is tailor the visual designs and the context around the medium and try to limit the size spread to something manageable. I’d also completely separate “ship scale” from “ground scale” and encourage a sort of “the players are standing around a tactical holotank” approach so that the tabletop will look pleasing to the eye while not needing a tennis court or parking lot to play in. So, the smallest viable combatants would need to be good looking and easy to build at up to 50mm in length, then top out at maybe 200-300mm for the really huge centerpiece stuff like stations or giant merchantmen.

Universe with “it’s not a moon it’s a space station ship” are fine if the players are some sort of underdogs (rebels, spies, terrorist, smuglers). But if you want to make them the law (Imperial Navy, Star Fleet, Colonial Fleet) you either stick them with a small ship and a very specialized task (and go back to some sort of PC-as-underdogs concept), give them a small ship and make them relatively insignificant in the grand scheme of things, or give them a big ship and then you (GM) are in trouble with mapping the thing, populating it, making it alive, and putting up with the PC sheer range of assets (crew as manpower, WMD sized ordinance, marines detachment, shuttle complement, fighter wing)…

I’ve always though the ideal space opera universe would have relatively small ship as the workhorse of both trade and naval fleets and to either make big ships technically impossible or to make them suboptimal (instead of the usual limitless the bigger the ship the bigger the guns) and thus confined to specialized roles.

Papercraft spaceships would be fun, but I always get indecisive when I try to pin down a scale. I’m not a fan of counters or top-down tokens, so I start at “the smallest size you can build the smallest ship in that universe in 3D”, which sounds OK until you run into universes where that scale means the really big stuff would end up the size of a Pinzgauer shuttle or even half the size of the table. 😆

And the gameplay isn’t half bad either… I just keep coming at it!

Have looked at the Tales of Honor app… Not available on Android yet.

Along the samish alley, have you seen FTL?

http://www.ftlgame.com/

Pretty good too!