I decided to start on a relatively simple ship to try another stab at doing david-like pixel art.
As such, I decided to introduce an even older tech style, with the idea behind it that the weapons and ships could be easily assembled in primitive manual factories (high output and low infrastructure cost, at the cost of max tech), without having to have a fancy manual factory (tech limited only by what you can develop, but at cost of very low output and high infrastructure cost*) or an autofactory (high output, but at the cost of a high infrastructure cost, and tech is limited by blueprints available)
This would give me even more options when it comes to rogue-faction owned ships (Because these ships are dirt cheap by comparison)
the "Ancient" style ships are so old, many of them outright lack shielding capabilities, with the ones that do having very tiny shields, and often are restricted to smaller slot sizes (though can tend towards having many smaller slots vs. fewer larger ones), and nearly exclusively use ballistic weapons, with some missile slots, and rarely an energy slot. They also tend to have underwhelming armor & hull HP, but make up for this in extremely low cost (both production & fleet points) and actually pretty good maneuverability.
the "Ancient" style weapons include basic ballistic weapons, primitive dumbfire missiles, though variants will also mount some more modern (But often still old and cheap) tracking ones, and a couple very crude directed energy weapons with ranges so short they could be classed as melee weapons (range ~200) (they are highly effective in their specific role: ie, one is a charged particle beam which does fragmentation damage, but imparts a huge amount of flux to the target).
*I only plan on a single faction with this capability so far - it will not be common /at all/.