A little spreadsheet of mine. It includes weapons, defences, hyperdrives, sensors, and life support and give's a variety of nice derived stats related to them which lets you see the effects of upgrades on a variety of factors. It is an excel sheet with 3 sub sheets so bear that in mind.

Linky.

Probably the single biggest stand out "WTH where they thinking" aspect is the way that weapons and shields get cheaper to produce and maintain for a given level of capability provided. And for defences the manufacturing and maintenance per mass stay very nearly the same or even decrease on average as you go up the tiers. Weapons do at least see an increase in per mass values so given an equal mass hull to mount them on your ship will get more expensive to produce and maintain, but nowhere near as fast as the rate at which it's power increases. Which contrasts heavily with sensor's, drives, and life support that not only get more expensive as they go up in tier, but do so at a more rapid rate than the capability increases.

There's also a lot of unfortunate data in there about how variable the mass efficiency per capability is on weapons and defences. Kinetic's aren't just the highest DPM per mass in the game, they're also shooting at the worst effective defence per mass in the game.

ANyway knock yourselves out with observations .