JP!

In my opinion this would even be a better system to distribute players across the available ships than the current rank system, which promotes grinding and gives newcomers a bad first impression. This concept works great in the game Starsector, for example. There each ship consumes supplies each day, bigger ships of course need more. So much more in fact, that going bounty hounting in a battleship will usually not return any profit, because one spends more money on supplies than one gains in bounty. This means that if one wants to hunt pirates, one does so in a ship that is appropriate for the task instead of the biggest, mightiest ship one can buy. I can imagine the same working out great in Naval Action, with players choosing their ship based on the task at hand and first rates only being used if the reward (capturing a port for example) is worth losing money in the short term. I may be biased though, since i despise any (progression) system that is based on grinding.