There are two main components to this section.

One is the ability to view each of your active ship designs, and delete any unnecessary designs. If you delete a design, this will not destroy any active ships of this type, it will simply prevent you from making any more.

The second is the ability to create ship designs. To do so, pick a hull type to base it on and it will take you to a design screen where all the vital statistics are listed as well as a dropdown menus for drive, armor type and quantity, shield type and quantity and guns, cannons and batteries for your ship, as is appropriate.

Note: You cannot exceed the ship's layout capacity,. It's also a good idea to keep an eye on cost as you build. You may decide you don't need state of the art drives if it is going to cost a million more. Once you are finished, enter a name in the field at the bottom and hit Record this Design. It's now ready to build!