This comment section is becoming a brilliant place of wisdom and useful tips for new players, please have a browse. And thanks to everyone for their lovely comments!

I have some comments about interior. Don't build large open spaces unless you have to. It looks artificial, dull and empty. Don't underestimate well placed interior blocks and inset blocks, they can make or break your style points. Half bed or half door combined with interior corner can make space look more spacious and will give character to your crew quarters. And have some fun with lights. Using different shades, leaving some darker corners or having one or two flickering lights in a toilet corridor makes great atmosphere. SE is better if you not only using the ship, but  also "feeling" the ship.

I'm just gonna say it, whenever you post tutorials about ship design I don't think and click on them. Doesn't matter that I have over 1400 hours, I still suck at building ships bigger than your gun boats. Thank you for the video BTW I'll be watching it a few more times just so it sticks on my smooth brain :D

As someone with thousands of hours dating back to the implementation of turrets, here are some additional considerations:
1. The form of a ship is highly consequential. Wings, pods, and things break off when Klang comes knocking, or especially when your enemy wants them to. Try to build symmetrically about the center of mass along the primary navigational axis of the ship. If you can’t avoid protrusions, up-armor the connection. It’s also good to remember that ship debris can get caught in pockets and that edges will snag on objects.
2. Even through gyroscopes have increased durability, they are vital to emergency maneuvers and general navigation. Protect them and do not leave them exposed if you can. They have significant targeting priority so place them such that they will not draw enemy projectiles through neighboring ship systems and vital structural components.
3. Even more importantly than with gyroscopes; Cockpits are a priority target for enemy turrets and there should be more than just a windshield protecting them if you can manage it. This applies to all non-combat vessels that may encounter the enemy.
4. If you plan on using reactive armor (shielding plates spaced away from the hull), do not mount them to important blocks because damage absorbed by the plates could travel.
5. Line of sight for turrets is essential to their function.
6. A ship’s weight will determine maneuverability and therefore combat effectiveness in many facets. Slow and weak is a bad combination without ample jump capability.
7. Use decoy blocks to guide turret target priority away from vital systems. It will save your ship.
8. It isn’t always a good idea to have every type of thruster on a ship. In most cases, a vessel is often best when maximized for a specific environment.
9. Use navigational clearance lights.
10. Always have a medbay for respawning.
11. Diversify energy generation.

One thing that deserves mention - PCU costs! In singleplayer these are mostly irrelevant, but on servers and especially Keen's servers they do matter once you hit "endgame" level builds. Nothing sucks quite like not being able to finish a ship because you ran out of budget.

Hey Lunar I don't know the statistics, but i'd guess most of your viewers aren't newbies. I would like to see videos on different ship building techniques (bottom-up, back to front, outside first vs. inside first, your frame kinda method where you'll lay down like a wire frame of sorts, etc.) and their different results.

Like many other commenters below, I have 1000s of hours in SE, but one thing I needed to hear early on when I was starting out was ships need 4 things to fly:

1) control (cockpit, remote, control seat)
2) steering (gyro, optional if rover)
3) power (depends on thrust type, but for starters at least a battery in most cases)
4) thrust (or wheels, if rover)

THEN spend 20 hours adding and subtracting other blocks and functions. :D

For anything more complicated than "make it go", I sometimes use something I got from Morphologis' content. He's an architect and talks about programming -- a list of features/functions required and desired by the user. This can be as high level or nuts-and-bolts as you need it to be.

e.g. Freighter ship program list might be:

Required:
- flight basics (the 4 things listed above)
- cargo (measured in whatever way is useful, e.g. 3 large cargo blocks, loaded with ore)
- MOAR THRUST!!!1! (enough to lift 3 large cargo blocks full of ore at 1.5g, meaning excess of .5g acceleration when lifting from the earthlike planet)
- 1+ connectors located in standardized, easy locations to fit with the rest of the ships a player uses

nice to have list:
- AI blocks for automated operation, docking, transferring cargo
- sorters
- antenna
- landing/docking blocks in addition to connectors
- programmable blocks for scripts
- lights (because I always forget these if I don't write them down)

---

Or a more role-play focused ship program for a hypothetical intrasystem patrol corvette (more high level, doesn't explicitly list all blocks needed):

- Expanse style vertical orientation; up thrust is primary (thrusters pointed down), no large thrusters in any other facing
- two control blocks, one oriented forward and one oriented up (this allows easy use of the main thrust either as up for landing in gravity, or forward when in 0g flight)
- 1 internal corridor using passage blocks running lengthwise from bow to stern, with all functional blocks except thrusters able to be accessed for repair internally in a pressurized environment
- main large thrusters mounted in 3 nacelles visually semi-separated from main ship body
- aft (bottom or down facing) and port air locks
- bunk rooms for notional crew of 4
- starboard mounted asymmetric fixed railgun firing up
- two custom turrets with gatlings for point defense
- arbitrary target size of 2000 PCU (roughly scaled for a fair, competitive fight against Modular Encounters, which seems to assume an established player will have roughly 10K to 30K PCU for total combat capable ship strength)

Whether specifying individual blocks or higher level functions/concepts, this programming helps me avoid losing sight of the point of a ship. With no specifications or limits, I tend to overbuild and add bloat/scope creep.

Plus all my early ships ended up being "flying brick with drills", "flying brick with guns", etc. But with defined parameters or ranges, I can make my ships more distinct from each other.

It's always good to go over ship design. Please do go in depth with as much as you can.

A great overview of what everything does.

The only thing I would add to that is that when you build a ship have a clear idea of what you want that ship to do. Give it specific metrics it needs to meet to be considered a success at that thing. It's all too easy to just keep adding parts until you have a frankenstein of a ship that is trying to do everything at once and failing. If you can measure how well a build is working out then you know what you need to work on.

For example. When designing any sort of freight ship, come up with an amount of cargo you want it to be able to carry and the environments you want it to operate in. Think about if you will have any resource constraints that you need to keep in mind for its intended use so you don't make it too expensive.

Eg: This cargo ship must be able to move one large cargo box full of ore between space and the earthlike planet without using uranium or platinum.
That is something you can test. If you turn your ship into a crater on re entry then you have data for the next build.

Same with any other build. Lots of people will chime in on warship builds that their super dreadnought will beat X design easily, but what a ship is designed to kill and in what environment, and for what cost matters.

Keep design parameters in mind for everything you make and your builds will get much better. "Being pretty" is a perfectly valid design consideration. Just keep it in balance with "being able to do its job"

Me: Guides are so helpful so I’m not constantly making bricks.
Also me: makes a brick

Some extra notice regarding conveyors and thrusters and railgun:
1. Make sure there are multiple conveyor paths throughout the ship, especially for ships with H2 thrusters, so that thrusters (and cargo access) won't die if a conveyor is shot.
2. Some blocks are explosive (yes you H2 container), they can be weakpoints and hazard for the ship, and not to mention warhead-fitted custom missiles or sort. So do keep in mind where they're placed, add protection, and don't put valuable stuffs like jump drive, medbay or script blocks near those explosives.
3. If the ship is large enough, you can hide thrusters in the ship for aesthetics and protection. The thrusters work just fine even if a part of the ship itself is right behind, just leave some space to avoid flame damage.
4. Do not place thrusters outside the grid where the cockpit is (eg. over a rotor) unless you know what you are doing, they don't respond to wasd keys and need complicated adjustments (mainly scripts) to control.
5. the video didn't mention that railguns need to charge after shots, and that's a huge power drain that could incapacitate movements and cause free fall on planets, so be careful when using this stuff, especially on smaller atmospheric fighters.

This. Game. Looks. Bloody. Mental. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t have the game but is really into this kind of thing, what you can do here is incredible. But also a bit scarily complex.

Oh yeah, how to build a dog toy. Thought this was gonna be one of those "Look at me I don't build bricks" but it turned out to be an actual guide for beginners on the basics of ship design. Great job ponching the nombuhz

There is no mention of designing a ship with a limited  PCU (Production Control Unit) budget.  Some parts like lights and conveyors are cheap but add up.  Really expensive PCU parts are weapons, especially turrets and custom turrets.

Boy I sure love having 2300+ hours and STILL managing to learn new things from these videos. I might in fact be a little stupid.

I have a brick it flies as one but boy does it also hit like one

I’ve played since 2021 and I’m just now finally getting the idea of building the systems first then design around them

17💯Toilet is of the utmost priority.

there are 2 fun things i do,  and new players can do and have fun with.

First is the survival pod challange/build.   staring with a survival pod, i gradually add on to it, build it up, increase its size length...in some cases i try and keep as much of the origional survival pod as i can.  while adding on to it....  (i even go as far as using pistons and connectors to "stretch" the ship at times.  attaching the piston to the hull, cutting the ship and extending the piston then building out to the piston limit and adding merge blocks, reconnecting, and building out from there.

this is fun because its mostly traveling from rock to rock looking for materials i need, building the refineries and such ON the survival pod.

alternatly,  moon landings, stations will sell ships.  with mining you can quickly often get enough ore to sell to the sttion to buy biger and biger ships...   once i get enough money i buy the big grid ships they sell and start modifying them.   its fun and often easier and quicker then building from scratch.

just started watching vid so haven't finished yet but the most important thing i learned on how to make your ships look good is to not be afraid to add shapes and structures that serve no purpose