What’s your ideal warship size for fiction?

[Mk38]

I mean in terms of the ‘hero’ ship and its crew.

I’m thinking 50-100 crew is generally an ideal sweet spot.

You can have a main ensemble cast of 6-12 characters as the core of your story, and a handful of side characters to kill off on top of allowing for room for a handful more nobodies to killed off as well. Much over 120 or so most of the crew will just be faceless soulless NPCs, or you’re spreading the character portion of the story telling too thin to keep the ship from feeling hollow.

Much less than 50 and it’s too few to realistically absorb much damage and casualties, thus requiring plot armor.

 

[Seragina]

side characters to kill off

Crews get killed off in show like 10x the complement lol

My take.
The usual 8-12 core party. Assuming not supertech setting!
Small ship: 36 to 150 crew; 3x engineering bots and whatever security bots no less than crew/2. Evacuation capacity: 5x crew; cargo capacity: 2% ship mass
If it's civilian: non-crew no less than 4x crew; evacuation capacity 10x