Originally posted by Pera
Well, scaling down fighters wouldn't excactly make the capships look any bigger, at least when compared to your own fighter. It's really hard to explain, but let's just say that when flying a 1 meter long fighter, capships don't feel huge, but you feel tiny 
I think, but aren't sure, that is has to do with the detail involved.
--All this stuff is pretty much explained by the bottom paragraph--
When you compare an 18-wheeler with a pickup truck, they have the same amount of detail. If you compare the same 18-wheeler to a cardboard box, they have the same amount of detail but there's more overall detail.
For example, if you have a side of a box 5 feet by 5 feet, then we'll assume that means there are 25 units of detail.
Now, if you have a building's wall that's 10 ft by 30 ft, that's 300 units of detail. So, if you shrink the box, you're decreasing the box size but you still have the same 300 units of detail for the wall and the same 25 units of detail for the box; the area it's spread out over is greater.
--Just a little bit down--
In Freespace, if you have a flat surface from a capital ship and the textures are 256x256, that's 65536 units of detail (assuming the units are 1- UOD per pixel). However, the
size of it may be 200 square feet.
Now, take a fighter. It has the same 65536 units of detail, but it's spread across 5 square feet. the density of detail is greater, hence, the capital ship doesn't really look bigger, and would look fine if you scaled it down to fighter size.
