Yeah - I was used to, in previous versions, happily just buying a new ship when I hit enough credits to afford the hull. Now, I have to be much more careful - instead of saving up 50k credits for an Apogee + weapons, I want to save up more like 80k credits to make sure I can keep the thing running while I haul it back over to pirate central.
For a large fleet, if you get caught out poor, you can probably recover - sell some ships, mothball some ships, fight with the ones that haven't been crippled by accidents...
But for a small fleet, if things go bad, there's no recovery - you're just toast; one accident will take your flagship down to where it can't be fielded, and then you die horribly and restart in a dinky little frigate that doesn't have enough supplies to even get to the hegemony station. (This may be due to combat aptitude's bonus CR resulting in the restart frigate not starting at full CR? Not sure...)
And tugs are vital if you're running around with anything with maximum burn lower than 5; you need at least that to be able to catch pirates.