Ship Design Checklist

This is intended to help new players avoid the most common pitfalls in ship design.

All Ships

• Does the game show any design errors in the box on the lower right?
• Do you have an engine? (You need to design one first.)
• Do you have enough fuel? The typical distance between two systems is somewhere between one and five billion km, with the average being about 3 billion km.
• Do you have a shipyard large enough to build it?

Updated Ships

• If this is meant to be a refit of an existing class: is this refit cheaper than scrapping and building a new ship?
• If you copied an existing design: did you develop better armor tech since designing the old class? The copied design still uses the old armor.

Military Ships

• Do you have at least enough MSPs to repair the worst malfunction (Max Repair)?
• If you intend your ship to be able to repair battle damage: Do you have at least twice the MSPs of your Max Repair value?
• Do you have the maintenance facilities to support a ship of this size? If not, your ship will use up all its MSPs and then slowly disintegrate.
• If you want to shoot down enemy missiles - do you have a resolution-1 sensor in your task group?
• Do you have enough power plants to power your energy weapons? Note the box on the lower left.
• For missile warships: do you have a magazine? Each launcher adds some magazine capacity, but you might want reloads.
• For carriers: did you reserve Flight Crew berths (check the "Keep Excess Q" box on the upper right)?

Specialized Ships

• Is your jump drive capable of jumping every ship that you want it to? A jump engine with a capacity of 10,000 tons mounted on a 7,000-ton ship can jump only ships up to 7,000 tons, not 10,000.
• Do you know the difference between military and commercial jump drives?
• For tankers/colliers: did you check the appropriate box on the upper right?
• For freighters/colony ships: did you include a Cargo Handling System?
• For salvage ships: did you include a cargo hold?