Tried and failed so far. Experimented with applying targets and whatnot, but it just won't click yet. My next idea is to make an event for conquering, and then trigger the spawning on that event as opposed to the direct conquer trigger (though I'm not confident this will work).

btw, thanks for the quick response. 

I've noticed that it seems like the only ships which are 'awarded'  are those which are labelled as such in the shipstyle defs (I think ur list covers them all). Problematically though I tried spawning colony ships upon conquest, and that didn't seem to work. I'm not sure why, possibly I just mistyped or made some other sort of human error, but it seems like the planetconquer trigger isn't happy with being used for awarding ships. I'll definitely be doing some more tests on this though, and haven't given it up.

thanks mate and hope you have a good one

<Triggers>
  <OnEvent>OnConquerPlanet</OnEvent>
    <Scope>Global</Scope>
      <PerformAction>
        <Action>AwardShipOfClass</Action>
        <StringParam>AwardCutterBlueprint</StringParam>
      </PerformAction>
      <PerformAction>
        <Action>AwardShipOfClass</Action>
        <StringParam>AwardCutterBlueprint</StringParam>
      </PerformAction>
</Triggers>