On scouts

There is a silly trope in common in video games with small scout units having larger sensor ranges than large dreadnaughts.

The thing with sensors is that (all else being equal) the larger the aperture, the more powerful it will be. This is a simple physical law, the larger something is, the more signal it collects, the better you see.

This has two consequences, one is that it will be physically larger so you need a big hull to support it. The secondary consequence is that a larger sensor needs more power generation and so you need a larger hull for bigger generators.

Now obviously if you have ship A with sensors and weapon systems and ship B with just sensors, then ship B will be smaller, but it realistically won't be an order of magnitude smaller. Hypothetically though, what if you can build the sensors an order of magnitude smaller? Well you'd still build it into the large platform with the weapons systems because it'd be more survivable and why would you ever want shooters without seekers? So either way your small vessels shouldn't see better than your big vessels.

There is one circumstance where it would make sense to separate sensors and weapons.

And ironically it is when the sensor systems are larger than the weapon systems.

Which is actually the case in real life.

For instance, fighters will almost always operate with AWAC support, but we separate the AWAC platform from the fast-movers. Why? Because those radomes are huge and it would be stupid to try and push that thing past the sound barrier.

We can look at warships for another example, a 3000 ton LCS is large enough to support strike-length VLS tubes, but you need an 8000 ton destroyer to carry the 12' SPY-1 radar. And even that's not big enough for the cancelled 22' AMDR, which required a 20000 ton nuclear powered cruiser to support. This has led to some interest in a surface warfare role for a Cobra Judy type vessel, because for the cost of putting all the sensors in a vulnerable dedicated platform, you get the benefit of needing only one 20000 ton spotter to cue all of those 3000 and 8000 ton shooters.

That doesn't mean small, short-sighted scout platforms aren't valuable though. They are cheap, which means you can build many of them and deploy to many locations at once and you can afford to lose them if they confront a superior force.