A few more things to keep in mind:
Ship Tech
- Low tech ships have poor flux stats and speed, but strong armor, good DP, many weapon mounts, and long deployment times. Their ship systems are almost exclusively offensive with either burn drive straight ahead or improvements to firepower.
- High tech ships have strong shields, good flux stats, and are fast, but are extremely fragile, have a smaller number of weapon mounts, and are generally restricted to energy/missile weapons. They also have low deployment times. Their ship systems tend to be defensive with ship repositioning or improvements to shields.
- Midline ships have stats that fit right between low and high and are defined by their versatility in types of weapon mounts.
Weapons
- Weapon arcs make or break a ship design. Because of the need to focus fire in this game, weapon arcs that cannot all focus on the same point are a lot less useful. Consider the Onslaught battleship. It has 3 large mounts, but none of them can fire on the same target at the same time (unless that target is extremely large). This means that it has a tendency to spray out flux without accomplishing anything useful, so it's important to carefully manage what guns are firing. To compensate for this, the onslaught has a HUGE DP pool and a reduction in cost to large mounts.
- Give the player options in how to lay out a ship. Many of your current designs are so limited in weapon placement and DP that there is no flexibility or creativity in ship layouts. Something to consider.
Ship Systems
- Without recruiting help from veteran modders, you'll have a very difficult time creating your own ship systems. Restricted in this way, your ability to create really cool designs is limited.
- With the existing ship systems from the vanilla game, maneuvering thrusters is an obvious pick for cruisers and capitals for your ships. A few of them would probably shine with the ammo feeder or missile autoforge though.
