The Ship Designer lets you create your own custom ship designs. You can invoke it from the Starport Information Panel or the Scenario Design Dialog.
The dialog box contains fields for setting the name of the ship, it's attack and defense factors, and jump rating. The jump rating may be limited depending on your empire's tech level.
Capacity is set in two ways. If the ship is primarily a carrier, you can set capacity in terms of factors carried (Cap (h)). Each factor requires 100 tons of capacity. If you are adding extended range to the ship, you can specify capacity in terms of the extra jump-1 increments of fuel to be carried. Each extra jump-1 requires 10% of the hull volume. Of course, adding extra fuel increases the volume! So the actual size of the ship doesn't increase linearly.
Beneath the fields the caluclated values are displayed. The actual size of the ship is given, the capacity necessary to meet the needs you've specified in the fields, the jump-1 fuel reqirements, and the jump range given the rating and extra fuel capacity. The cost in resources to build and how long it would take to build at the present location.
In order to make ship development easier, the game comes with a selection of ship designs
you can choose from.
Click the load button and a dialog box will appear.
Select from this and the designer will be filled with the statistics of that ship design.
You can also take your own designs and save them to the library.
When you are happy with the design, click the save button.
Later in the same game, you can load it again.
But they aren't saved from game to game.
When you are done with your design, click OK to return.