A fictional fleet is constrained by its rarest component

How could a disloyal planner build a deliberately bad fleet for an independent world in the Castle Federation setting?

Waste the planet's economy on an inefficient FTL capital ship or small craft whose expensive drive components, poor redundancy, and coupled operation erase the supposed savings.

An independent planet's budget makes the choice between fighters, sublight gunboats, and interstellar warships decisive. The deliberately disloyal plan would consume an enormous share of that budget on a single inefficient FTL ship. Class-one components are the setting's expensive industrial bottleneck, so reducing hull size does little to reduce the critical cost. Building close to the maximum volume supported by a drive set normally produces more useful capacity. An attempted smaller-ship programme is recalled as a particularly poor design decision for that reason. The wider discussion adds procurement fraud and false redundancy claims as other ways a fleet can look stronger on paper than it is.