@ Alex: What really hurts is I need to leave about ten slots empty just to have optimal selection of clunkers if I want to recover enemy ships. Early in the game, I reach about twenty ships very soon after game start, and I need more to take on pirate bases or bounties that often scale slightly faster than I can keep up. Midgame, I slowly upgrade from Shrike (P), Enforcers, and Mules to bigger ships. By endgame, multi-capital slugfests means I need about twenty ships minimum, unless I have optimized Paragon/Astral/Doom ships to slaughter things left and right AND I have maximum map size, because of peak performance. Even with Paragon/Astral, I need to retreat Doom and carriers frequently, sometimes Eagles and Falcons too in a long battle, then all I have left to deploy are either Apogees brought primarily for surveying and cargo hauling, smaller phase ships effective only under player control, or frigates too small and fragile to fight normal battles (but good for picking off ships in pursuit). If I use default size of 300, more cruisers and capitals will run out of peak performance.
With Reaper Harbinger gone, I like to bring and chain up to five Afflictors to do one-shot cheese Harbinger used to do. (I would bring more, but lack of CP makes filling fleet with too many Afflictors inconvenient. I often bring just three or four.) Many of the big targets do not need Quantum Disruptor to bypass their shields. Many of the tough capitals only have frontal shields, and battlestations have walls to aim at to kill via splash damage. I also have four or five logistics ships.
I often bring two tugs to keep my burn high.
As for Officers, I do not have any skill points to spare for officers. I would like one point for six officers, but I cannot spare that point. I make do with four officers.
Bottom line, I run into fleet cap early, or would if I did not care to recover clunkers, and will always stay at about 20 to 25 ships. If I did not care about recovering enemy ships, my fleet would constantly be at thirty for nearly the entire game. Early game would be frigates and destroyers. Endgame is mostly bigger ships for me. Others might want destroyers like beam Sunders or Spark Drovers.
@ Goumindong: I do not want the change to Reinforced Bulkhead if that means losing guaranteed recovery. I throw it on all of my ships without officers to prevent hull and loot loss.
P.S. Throwing Reinforced Bulkheads on most ships is annoying because ships have a tight OP budget that I would rather spend other combat stuff, but I do not want to permanently lose ships, weapons, and loot. (Sometimes, I scuttle the ship, but at least I recover all of the loot it had instead of losing it.) I guess I could eschew Reinforced Bulkheads and reload the game immediately every time I take a casualty.