Shipbuilding requires shipyard complexes, appropriate materials for the ship construction and a tooled blueprint for the ship design. Once all these are available construction can begin.

Use Best
As well as selecting who the owner will be upon completion, the other option is whether to use the best available items in the construction of the ship.
If selected, then at the outset a check will be done to determine if there are high mk items for hulls and armour. If these are present, the construction will begin using the highest mk items present and the hulls and armour will be removed from the base.
If the internal items are present they will also be removed at this time.

Shipbuilding
A starbase requires shipyards in order to build starships. Each shipyard is able to assemble up to four hulls per week although multiple shipyards can work together in order to build a single ship, i.e. 4 shipyards will built 16 hulls of a ship in a week. Each blueprint allows 20 hulls of that ship design to be built, but the maximum number of hulls that can be added to any ship is the square root of the total ship hulls multiplied by two. So for a 100 hull ship you can only add 10(root of 100)x2 or 20 hulls. For a 50 hull ship it would be 14 hulls per week (7(root of 50)x2). If building a 50 hull ship at 14 per week, the remaining 6 hulls 'allowance' on a single BP could be put towards building a second ship.

Construction List
Each starbase will have a list of ships currently queued for construction. Each ship will be attempted in list order. If a ship cannot be constructed for any reason, the next one on the line will be attempted. Prioritising a ship will place it at the top of the queue, shuffling the rest down one step.

Construction will continue on a weekly basis until the ship has been completed.

Once complete there will be an entry on the weekly maintenance report. This will include the ship’s number and its security code.
The latter is important if the ship has been built for another player as the base will generally need to deliver life forms that will supply crew factors. This is because the ship without crew will not be able to perform any actions.

Incorporating Items
Along with hulls and armour, a ship will require the installation of the items listed on the blueprint. At the time of adding a ship to the construction list, a check will be done on the items present in the starbase and all the items listed will be removed from the starbase. If there are insufficient items present, then all that can be taken will be. A list of missing items will be displayed on the starbase report and then stored. At the final stages of construction a second check will be made, in order to incorporate any items that were not present at the beginning.

Either the online ship editor or the off-line ship editor can be used to design a ship. Design requires selecting a number of basic parameters.

• Size (quantity of hulls)
  
• Hull Type (heavy, normal, light, xlight)
  
• Hull Material (metal, organic, crystal)
  
• Race (not needed for ships under 76 hulls)
  
• Armour

200 hulls is that threshold where unlimited use of a blueprint finally comes to an impasse and each ship needs unique attention. Even the techs supporting the ships get larger on account of dealing with the practicalities of ships that push physical laws to the boundaries.

Tech

Max Hull Size	Tech Mass (mu's)
250	2000mu
300	3000mu
350	4000mu
400	5000mu

Blueprints
Each ship requires the exhaustive use of a blueprint. The blueprint is exhausted when the ship construction is completed.

Ship Size (hulls)	Blueprint Size (mu�s)
225	100
250	200
275	300
300	400
325	500
350	600
375	700
400	800

Hard points areas of a ship's hull designed to mount weapons. They are reinforced and connected to the main energy and sensor grids that are integrated at the time of construction. The quantity of hulls (its surface area) and type of hull determine the quantity of hard point on a ship.
All defence systems including point defence launchers do not require hard points to mount.

Heavy Hull - 2 per point of surface area
Normal Hull - 1 per point of surface area
Light Hull - 1 per 5 points of surface area
Xlight Hull - 1 per 10 points of surface area


All weapons require 1 hard point except:
Torpedo Launchers - 10
Guns - 2
Cannons - 5
Batteries - 50
Heavy Batteries - 150

The Position Editor can be used to determine the surface area of a ship for differing quantity of hulls and type.
In the example below a ship is being designed with 100 normal hulls. It has a surface area of 122.6 and therefore 123 (rounded off) hard points, meaning that it can install 24 photon cannons or 61 photon guns.

Templates, generated using the Position Editor add a huge amount of flexabiltiy to ship design. When used in shipbuilding they allow for the shipyards to ignore the internal components specified by the ship blueprint, replacing them at the time of construction with those listed on the template.

Note that when building using templates, the hulls and armour of the construction remain based on the original blueprint. If however the template has higher mk hulls and/or armour (though has to be the same type, i.e. light and metal, heavy and crystal etc) it will use the template specifications providing that Use Best option is set to No.

Example
The base is attempting to build a Warhammer design ship but wants to incorporate different weapon systems as defined by the template WARHAMMER Variant 2 WITH mkII Hulls (4321). As well as differing in internal components to the blueprint the template for the Variant 2 also differs in that it is based on mkII heavy hulls.

Code:

Date 15.1:	Build Ship {1234} {5678} {Priority - No} {Use Best - No} {4321}
Building Warhammer (1235) for position 5678.
Ships internals will be fitted from template: WARHAMMER Variant 2 WITH mkII Hulls (4321).
- 75 Heavy Hull mkII (81)
- 165 Ablative Armour Plates (460).