Ship buildings

Thrust and propulsion
Nimble ships are generally better. That is something anyone would probably tell you. When you are designing your ship, you should always keep in mind, that you are not only going forwards. Thrust in other directions is as important as the forward thrust. If you skim the thrusters going to the sides, you will loose maneuverability, if you underestimate breaking thrusters, you won't be able to stop your ship efficiently and that mad lead to bad maneuverability for example.

You should keep in mind, that components and ammunition actually have some weight, so when designing ship in creative, try to fill the containers with a probable load to see how the ship will behave, not just in space, but also in gravity. When you underestimate the ship's thrust to weight ratio, it might lead to bumping into things and possibly damaging your ship.

Hydrogen Thrusters
Hydrogen powered ships are usually lighter, thrusters themselves require less components, and are therefore lighter than ion or atmospheric thrusters. You will get best thrust to weight ratio, but you do have to keep the hydrogen supply in mind. Hydrogen thrust is usually more PCU intensive than atmospheric / ion thrusters. It is also interesting that 9 small hydrogen thrusters have better overall thrust than one large hydrogen thruster of the same size.

Atmospheric + Ion Thrusters
These thrusters require no fuel, energy only. They are both heavier than hydrogen thrusters but do not require conveyors and tanks. They are less PCU intensive. But have worse thrust to weight ratio. Small thrusters of these types are also weaker when you put the small ones instead of one big thrusters.

Gyroscopes and rotation
Ship's roll and turn rates are directly linked to two things. Total power of gyroscopes you have on your ship, and the proximity of your control block (cockpit, seat, remote) to the center of mass of your grid. Basically the further your control block is from the center of mass, the more gyroscopes you would need for the same effective turn rate.

Gyros are the one block where the better tier is the most noticeable. It is also not that expensive, so investing into a better gyroscopes is a good investment.

Structural integrity
Even if your ship is so great and will never crash, you should still be prepared for such an eventuality. It is good to have only few weak points and none if possible. All important parts should be held from several sides and covered in decent armor. Using shields to increase structural integrity is also important, especially for miners. But be aware that structural integrity shielding does not protect you from direct fire or explosions.

Keep in mind that blocks such as reactors, jump drives, hydrogen tanks and some others create an explosion when damaged/destroyed. Therefore having such blocks exposed can lead to explosive results that you won't like.

Component tiers
Keep in mind, that you can use better tier components. You will increase your components power / efficiency / strength (whatever you want to call it) when using tiered ones. You will also save your block and PCU limits, since you won't need as many as you would need with the vanilla blocks. Tiered blocks are usually more expensive and therefore heavier. They are better armored in most cases as well.

Utility ships > Base ships
People usually like to build large multi-purposed ship. Refineries, containers, assemblers, decent thrusters, weapons etc. This is simply wrong. Let me elaborate why.

Specialization > multi-role
Specialized ships are usually designed for one single purpose. Miners, grinders, jumpers, cargo haulers. That means, they excel at the role they are given and usually have high PCU to performance efficiency. Multi-role base ships on the other hand are heavier (they have blocks you have to carry with you that are not useful for the specific task), PCU and block intensive (you will have more PCU blocked by the base ship than you would have by the specialized ship), higher risk when operating such a ship (when your ship gets damaged or raided, you might loose much more resources than with a smaller specialized craft).

Decentralized ships > Packed base ships
If you have all your ships specialized, you can separately hangar them and keep them safe when not in use. You will also limit your performance impact on the server. People usually don't take hangar into account, what is hidden there can't be damaged, can't be raided, does not take your PCU/block limits. If you use one big base ship with everything on it, it will be required in the game for most of the time and you will have lower amount of limits free for other projects. With one base ship you also risk your stuff getting destroyed while in transit, since you can't have a safe-zone up while in ship-mode.

Good way of organizing your grids is to have a base grid, that processes your ores and has some amount of components on it so you can build what you need to build.

Than a cargo ship, in which you have the surplus of your tech components and rare ingots. You will have this ship in the hangar most of the time, and you will only take it out when you need some resources out of it or store more into it. You will keep most of your resources safe in this manner, since hangar can't be raided.

Individual miner ship, trade jumper ship and grinder ship are optional, based on your playstyle. If you are a solo player, you will probably have all of those, and in that case it is good to have them hangared when you don't need them. Not just for their safety, but for your limits as well.

In general, having multiple ships is not an issue if you can store them somewhere. The advantages of this beat the disadvantages when considering all the risks of centralized base ships.

Durable ships are important
Even with shields it is still important to cover your exposed components in armor. Shields can fail, and when they do, you might get wrecked in seconds if you don't use enough armoring.

There are 4 types of possible armor:

Light armor
cheap to produce, light, but does not have that much durability. Protects only against light weapons such as gatling guns and gatling lasers.

Heavy armor
also cheap to produce, much more durable than light armor but it is also heavy. Covering your ships in heavy armor, at least the exposed parts is the least you can do to have at least some protection. This applies not just for the combat ships, but for the miner and grinder ships as well.

Light crystalline
has the best weight to HP ratio, but you need to get some gardinium to produce the components it requires. Is lighter than heavy armor and more durable.

Heavy crystalline
this armor is the most durable but heaviest of all the possible choices of armor. Requires not just gardinium but ravinium as well to produce.

Shields
Proper combat ship (be it for PVE or PVP) requires decent shielding. Shape of the ship is important, bigger ships usually have higher shield cap. The rest is based on your ship's power output. The more power you have, the stronger the shield will get. This applies until you reach your ship's shield cap. Any excess power after that will go towards shield recharge rate.

Shields can be modulated to better protect against energy or kinetic weapons. Use this to your advantage when you know what weapons your enemy is using.

Weapons
You should refrain from using a single type of weapons on your ship. For better description on how to know which weapon is what type, see this weapons guide. Using weapons of only one type means your ship can be easily countered. If you also use most of your weapons against armor, they will be quite ineffective when dealing with enemy shields. You should always use weapons that can deal damage to shields and weapons that can do damage to grid itself once the shield is down.

Also take into account that we are using Weaponcore system, you should check the guide for weaponcore in our manuals section.

Dealing with shields
There are multiple weapons that can do decent damage to shields. Pulse lasers, coilguns, blasters etc. You can distinguish them by their blue projectiles. These weapons usually do limited damage to armor and blocks, but they are good when you need to overheat the target's shield. Raw burst damage, such as big explosions, can also overheat the target's shield.

You should also consider ATLAS lasers, which are specifically designed as shield busters.

Special weapons
Disruptors, flares and graviton emitters are weapons that do not direct damage. But can either flag nearby hostiles, disrupt target's subsystems and deflect guided missiles in case of the graviton emitter.

Weapons vs ship's hull
You should keep in mind, that if you create a big ship, you might lack the PCU limits to actually arm it. Balancing the decent hull with decent shields and decent weapons is the skill that is acquired by time and experience. You can also collaborate with others from your faction to build larger ships. But beware of putting all your eggs so to say into one basket. Loosing one large ship might push player/faction back for days or weeks.

Be creative when working on your combat ships, most people try to estimate what kind of ships they will be facing. If you use something unexpected, it might give you an edge.