I was looking back at some of our designs and I'm no longer as sure as I was that Wreth have built a Corvette PL. I think we might have just been repeatedly screwed by bad cost rolls. Everything effective we have is either limited in number or expensive. And I'm not talking about being a little expensive. The Lance Cannon for example uses 7 units of crystal. Now I believe that one unit of resource uses up one TU when transported (please correct me if I'm wrong). That's more than our standard transports can carry in order to build a single small cannon. Small cannons take up one TU when being transported. There is an obscene amount of wastage going on. Little wonder they outnumber us.
You appear to have made a couple critical misconceptions here. Not all crystal/ore/wood/silk is equal. If I say that 1 TU can ferry 5 units of resources, those resources are in some undefined intermediary form. 5 Crystal is not a defined volume of crystal, just as 5 ore is not a defined volume of ore.
5 ore could represent quite a lot of copper, a bar of gold, or an amount of rarer metal so small that could hold it in your palm. 6 crystal could be two bathtub sized lifting crystals, a dozen head sized trim crystals, six doublefist sized cannon crystals, or not quite one lance crystal. It's not that the additional volume is (entirely) wasted, it's that it's just more resource intensive to make more advanced crystals.
So, while I'm not averse to you flavoring a revision as reducing waste materials, a mismatch between transport volume and material cost is not a clear indicator that the Spire Mafia is stealing all your shit.
Also, implementing Kashyyk's links asap.