[@WilsonTurner]Alright, I wanted to make a long post about strategies and tactics but it may come off a little insulting.
The long story cut short is that your intentions and proposed rules don't match.
Writing engaging battles is up to the player and their pool of creativity. Weapons and tech limitations almost don't matter.
Same with numbers, I personally can effectively write with any number of ships.
Though because of the influence of LotGH, I prefer playing with large fleets, using formations, flanking an all the other fun tactics you can just barely taste with only a few dozen ships.
There are tons of other issues I can talk about but really there are way too many directions I can approach this thing and it'd only turn into a tl;dr mess.
Let's just say your ideas are based on Hollywood and other popular media instead of level thinking.
If you want to avoid the insane messes space NRPs apparently come down to then you don't need rules, you need action.
When somebody gets lazy and engages in a war of numbers and doesn't even think about where or how these come from, warn him.
It's an effective method, even if admittedly management-intensive.

[quote=@WilsonTurner]
<Snipped quote by Kimiyosis>

My point exactly.

I'd rather have people play cautiously because each ship is costly to replace, and leaves up greater risk, rather than just have people throw everything at a problem and just replace all lost without a sweat.
[/quote]That's a misunderstandment of the scale here.
Shall I list how many fighters and ships we produce right now with boorish modern day technology and industry which doesn't involve all the delicious ways to get resources in abdunance?
The setting of most Space NRPs is very much an utopia compared to what we have now.

It's an issue if people get overboard but the cold fact of warfare is that practically everything is repalceable.
It'd hit the nation/civilization's economy and I'd love if players RP that but in effect replacing hundreds of ships in years, months or even days (depending on tech assumptions) is a cold fact with the scale we are all working at.

Even a single-planet civilization is pretty damn huge and can afford plenty of resource or industrial capacity.
Again, it seems to come back to using rules when it should be the responsibility of the GM.

EDIT:
Alright, so a few hard numbers.
- You have a civilization with billions of people.
- You live on a dirt ball with roughly 6 zettatons of mass.
- Assuming the solar system as average you have roughly 4 yottatons of matter to gather, not counting the Sun itself
- You have easy access to devices which generate at least megatons of energy (over thousands of times more than what the entire modern world produces altogether).
- You have ships that are efficient enough and have enough fuel to use these megatons/second or PW range reactors non-stop
- You have ships that not just capable of reaching any of the planets in your star system which each but even travel to other systems.

So yeah, what is really stopping you? I'm not even considering the various tech niceties like matter replicators.
This is more or less the utopia we want and you wonder that civilizations can handle loses in battle?