Is the hyperion building that affects miniaturization working?  I monkeyed with it today and didn't seem to do anything. 

From what I've seen miniaturization seems to shrink the weapon/equipment size, what was once, "paraphrasing", 11 mass become  a 9 per-say like GC2.

What kind of confuses me is, lets assume I make a ship and load it with equipment, weapons and max it 85/85 capacity. Then I build it on a planet with the hyperon shrinker,,,, well it seems kind of redundant. So now I got a ship thats 75/85  from my hyperon planet and I assume I have to refit it to fill the extra space?  I think it would make more sense to make the hyperon shrinker a empire wide wonder  build that effects all ship yards period, "so ya know what your building in the designer". As it is at a glance and try, it seems like a redundant building because you cant make an overloaded ship 95/85 to accommodate the hyperon perk with out all the work around.

As larsenex said ,"I believe it is currently broken.".  I don't even bother building that building because it doesn't seem to do anything worthwhile at the moment.

hrmm i diddent think it worked because of the specified on this planet now i wonder how far i can break this

... and it was easier to conquer Drengi than to just build your own we loves Beta

My own planets were busy doing more useful things. I was not going to waste time and effort to bring Drengi upto scratch in the end phase of the game, so i simply used what was there already to get any use out of it. Big misconception by the way 'end phase of the game', turn 141 should still be the early middle of the game not one of the last turns before you have annihilated everything. On a large map an odd 150 turns to complete a game is to short by far. 

Neither would i, nor should anyone rely on it, but the auto designer does update the standard (template) ships to make use of the higher mass cap. So if the situation arises in a game let the game use it, but don't manually design ships that need it.

Yep. If only ship templating would work properly. Might as well wish for design parameterisation or type placement*.

Design parameterisation.

The ability to specify the balance between the various (up-gradable) equipment classes. Example 10% engine, 20% shielding, 5% sensors, 5% life support, 50% beam weapons, 10% armour and the rest 0%.

Type placement.

A placeholder piece of equipment with a class and stats to be placed on a hard point in the design. Example a 'beam class placeholder'. This allows the player to add this piece of equipment to the ship design with specified scale, orientation, animation, and other settings (including something like an order number). The auto designer should then replace this placeholder with the current beam weapon in the game.

Of course this means there should be placeholder pieces for Beam, Kinetic, Missile, Shield, Armor, Point defense, Engine, Sensor, Life support parts and possibly even for the modules like the transport, colonization, and construction modules.

Combined.

When you then develop (research) a better ship tech the auto designer should upgrade the placeholder piece with the state of the art version of the right class. It should honour the distribution of mass as specified by the parameters. By giving the placeholder pieces an order number he can even determine which ones to use when. For example you could design a ship with 5 missile placeholders, so when the auto designer needs only to place 3 he will know which 3 to use.

Correct, for most races. The Krynn can build the Labor Oracle which gives a Military Adjacency bonus of 4. This can result in a total of 55% (10% + 9 * 5%).

Funny thing is the Hyperion buildings are player wonders, so if you are lucky and you conquer a planet where there is already a Hyperion Shrinker then your empire total miniaturization level increases even further.

Update.

With +8.3, things get comical. A ship is 10x as large as before:

How did you do that?  I would like to know.

The way the Hyperion Shrinker is described in game convinced me that it was useless, and so I never built it.  Thanks to this thread I now know that it works differently and could be very valuable.

This should be an example to the Stardock developers of how important it is to get the little things (like tooltip descriptions) correct - if you don't, your players might never try out a feature that you worked hard to get into the game.

Part of the point of an open beta is for us to test everything and see if it does what it says.    there are quite a few things that I have thought were broken, only to later learn were not...   there is an incredible amount of variation with this game....  which means it has a huge amount of replayability...