There's been a lot of questions about how the ship designer works, how it meshes with the custom civilizations, when A.I. can use player built ships.  I'll try and answer all of those in this tutorial as well as tips and tricks I've found. If I've missed anything feel free to add it below or let me know that I need to add it to this.

For this tutorial, we'll do a rundown of:

- Ship Designer Basics

- Creating New Parts

- Weapon Nodes (so ships fire actual weapons rather than little red dots)

- Ship Design vs Ship Template

Ship Designer Basics

Basic steps to using the ship designer:

We can enter the ship designer through the ship yard or this icon on the title screen.

Once you select faction, colors, and textures, you'll get a screen like this.

Select new design at the bottom left of the screen.

Here under appearance, you can select a ship template or start a completely new design by selecting the block.  It is IMPORTANT to make sure you select the correct hull size for the ship you want to design.  Otherwise you end up with a tiny fighter sized frigate that was supposed to be 5x the size of a fighter. For this project, I've selected the Huge Starter block.

Now that we have our starter, select the other ship icon under appearance.

This gives you access to the available ship parts that can be accessed by size, type, or style.  Generally I work only in styles because it separates the parts by the race they belong to.  I have found that the ships are scaled to the starter block and generally you want the first part you place to be around the 100% scale option.  You can make it bigger if you want to design a very large ship, or smaller if you want a tiny ship.

Next click the gear option in the bottom middle of the screen.

It will bring up this screen.

I generally use these options as it gives me the finest control over the ship parts.  You can now access all ship parts as well as make the smallest rotations, offsets, and scaling.

Now we can start designing our ship.

We can select a piece from the cosmetics and click any one of the red nodes which will place the part.

We can then click on the part to select it or select the part in the upper left corner of the screen.

Now that we have selected the part, we can use the editor in the bottom right corner to scale. rotate, offset (move), animate, flip, or duplicate the part.

Orange- Flip the part across an axis

Blue- Duplicate the part across an axis

Green- Group and create new parts options (We'll discuss this more below)

White- Change textures, hide part so it's invisible, and delete part. (You can also just hit delete on your computer)

Red-

Scale: Increase and decrease size of the part.

Rotate: Rotate a part along an axis (The wing shaped parts have trouble with this command sometimes. You can attach the wing to a different part that will rotate correctly and then rotate that part to rotate the wing)

Offset: Move the part along an axis.

Animation Options

Animation can be activated with the play button in the bottom middle of the screen.

Animation comes in several forms.  Rotation, offset movement, and scaling.

Rotation: Continuously rotates an object along an axis

Offset: Moves an object along a set track and then back

Scaling increases then decreases an objects size in one, or all directions depending on whether Scale Proportionally is checked.

Those are the ship designer basics.  Now lets discuss how to make your own ship parts.

Creating New Parts

Here's my current ship.

Lets say I want to add turrets onto it, but placing 8 highly detailed turrets that are the same is going to be a lot of work.  To get around this problem the ship designer allows you to group and save a set of parts as a ship part that can then be placed onto the ship.

We start by offsetting the ship so that we can access the starting block.  (We'll move it back later, but you really want to work off of the starting otherwise rotation and offsetting the part will be difficult later)

When putting a new part together it is extremely IMPORTANT to not use any of the duplicate functions.  Those duplicated pieces will not be copied over and you'll end up will one cannon instead of two for instance. It is also important that only the first piece of the new part is connected to the starter block and every piece there after is attached to that first piece. Otherwise you can end up with pieces that are not included in you're part. We can check before we save the part if everything is included in that part.

Some parts have engine trails and these will show up in whatever direction the engine is facing.  I believe it is possible to turn off engine trails if you plan on having parts that use engines as cannons (I do this a lot)

Once your part is done, we can test, save, and place the part.

While holding control on the side bar select all pieces of the new part you wish to make.  Your part should look like this:

Select group parts.  The parts selected on the sidebar will go from this:

to this:

Any pieces that were not combined are not currently included in the new part and need to be replaced. Once all parts can be grouped you are ready to save your new part. Ungroup the part and reselect all pieces.  Select save group of components as a new part and name your part. Your new part should be available to place in the All section of the Style cosmetic parts. Each time you make a new part it will be invisible until you reload the ship designer.

Now my ship is covered in turrets.  IMPORTANT: Do not attach parts onto parts you made.  It causes the scaling to implode and your ship will look very different from what you've designed once you leave the ship designer.

Okay, we're almost ready to save the ship as a template or design, but first we need to add equipment for a design or weapon nodes for a template.

Weapon Nodes

We can now place equipment. Select the equip screen and choose equipment for your ship and place accordingly.  The important part here is where you place a weapon is where the ship will fire from. If you do not place any weapons and save as a ship template to use in a custom civilization your ship will fire single red dots rather than the kinetic, missile, and beam animations.

Make sure that your ship has weapons even if it will be used as a template.

Ship Design vs Ship Template

When you save the ship you have a couple options.  We won't get into battle roles here.  That's going to be changing in the Supernova expansion.  What we will talk about is ship design vs ship template.

Saving the ship as a design means that the ship is accessible to any faction using the base faction style. In this instance if I save this ship as a design, any faction using the Terran Alliance style will have access to this particular ship. I have a Sith Empire faction that uses the Terran Alliance style as its base. They will have access to this ship as is if I save it as a design. The A.I. will be unable to modify the design and can only build it with the equipment I placed, but it can do so if it decides it wants to use this design.  You can also build this design in a shipyard.

Saving as a ship template is very different from a ship design.  A ship template will not appear on the list of ships to build in the ship designer. Instead it will appear next to the starter blocks where you can select it and then equip it or add more cosmetics to it.  The A.I. will only build this ship if you put it into the available templates of a custom civilization shown in the picture below.

The A.I. can now use this design and equip it as it sees fit.  

The last two things that I want to mention are:

1. If you upload a civ with custom ship colors it won't really work unless each ship was designed with that color scheme.

2. If you upload a ship design for other people to enjoy and then delete it because you don't want the A.I. using it, it deletes it from the workshop.  The only work around I've found for this is to upload a civilization full of ship templates.  I mostly upload civilizations for this reason.

Good luck on your ship designs. Hope this helps you get started.