So as evidenced by this thread here [forums.keenswh.com]some of the current exploration ships have been a mixed bag. With some good advice to improve your ship design and hopefully better enforced rules[forums.keenswh.com] Keen, we can increase the quality of the ships submitted. I also suggest to Keen to have the moderators and maybe trusted forum members to help screen wave 2 submissions to reduce the workload and increase the amount and quality of the ships that make it in. For brevitys' sake, when I say ship, I mean stations too. I couldn't cover everything, so there will be expantions in the future, and feel free to add suggestions to this guide too.

DISCLAIMER: Following these tips won't necessarily increase the chance of your entry making it in. But if they do make the cut, they will be a much more pleasant find amongst other players.

Is your ship survival friendly? Does it have the necessary production blocks on it? Using the vanilla ships as a base, all of the cargo ships bar the military ones have some form of production capability. Be it having assemblers, refineries, or blast furnaces. Or any combination of the three. Stations and large "general purpose" ships should at least have one of each. Having connector points and collectors also increase a ships usefulness. Also if they are sufficiently large or a station, you might want to future proof your entries by allowing room for expansion. So if someone wants to make a new home out of your station, they can do so without having to remodel the place. In the production room of my abandoned station, even though there is only one refinery and assembler, there is room to place one more of each.

Pipe up your stuff! This should be non issue as failing to meet this should get your entry rejected, but for some things I have found that isn't the case. Generally speaking, you should be able to access most of the ships inventory from any cargo hatch you can find. Having some "off grid" systems such as a backup reactor or personal cargo containers in your crew quarters are totally fine.

Build modestly. This is very subjective and comes down to opinion and how the ship is designed, but try not to overbuild your entries. Namely if your ship has eight large reactors and it needs only one large reactor to function that's overkill. "But redundancy!" Nothing wrong with that, but then it should only have two or a few small reactors as backup. As someone said there is a bit of a discrepancy between ships that are built in creative and survival as survival ships only use what they need. Every excess thing you add to a ship will subvert a players need to go out and explore, build their own manufacturing systems or mine because they can scrap it without harming the ships core functions. Also unless it's a military ship, use heavy armor sparingly, as it yields 6x the steel plates of a regular armor block. Meaning a ton of resources.

Unless your ships are solar powered this is meaningless as spawning ships powered down defeats the entire point of this Keen. (Also if your ships are solar powered set your turrets to shoot moving targets if you want your ship to be hostile as they are unowned currently). Also feel free to get creative and add some booby traps to your ship! I won't list any examples as I don't want to spoil any ideas.

A ship's defense should be appropriate for its size. Small large ships like like the rescue ship are fine if they are undefended, or an interior turret or two would suffice. A ship the size of a mining transport or commercial freighter (smaller than you think without those solar arrays) should have 2-3 turrets on it. Ships the size between the mining hauler or Red 1 Should have about 4-6 turrets on them. I'd say ships notably larger than Red 1 should have 7-8. After that, scale accordingly. Military ships for obvious reasons can go above this limit.

When filling your ships full of goodies and supplies be sure to only fill them to a containers 1x inventory. If not it's inventory will be truncated if played on 1x and everything in it will be deleted. Ignoring this might cause the people who play on 1x to get nothing at all.

Small Cargo on 1x inventory settings:
-Small ship 125 L
-Large ship 15,625 L

Medium cargo
-Small ship 8,000L

Large Cargo
-Small ship 27,000 L
-Large ship 125,000 L


-Ammo
From the cargo ships I captured, they all seem to have about 60 units of ammo per missile and gatling gun turret. Since turrets have relatively small storage space, it's advised to have its' ammo stored in a regular cargo container. Also I noticed that missile turrets are set to a lower range than gatling guns to conserve ammo. For small ships, each weapon can hold 4 units of ammo on 1x. If it has the inventory space, I'd say 4-15 units of ammo is reasonable per weapon. Military ships carry more ammo than usual so I'd say about 100 units per turret on a military vessel and 20-25 units of ammo for military small ships.

-Fuel. This was the one that grinds my blocks, for me when I captured a cargo ship the main prize next to the ship itself, was it's supply uranium (and ammo). So finding a small ship with 50+ kg of uranium is a bit frustrating. Seriously, I have seen ships with a cruse time measured in days because people put way too much fuel in them. All of the cargo ships and the red ship have between 10-30 uranium in them. Small ships don't need much. .1-.25 per small reactor on a small ship is plenty. I'd say 1-5 uranium on a small ship and 10-30 on a large ship is sufficient. You want endless power, put some solar panels on them. This shouldn't be an issue if your ship is piped up like it's supposed to be so the reactors will auto pull what they need to run. However, be sure to divide your uranium evenly among all your reactors if your ship needs multiple reactors to run, otherwise it will only be powered by the one you put the uranium in!

-Resources
I won't tell you exactly how many ingots or components to put in your ship. But I'd say for ingots and ore amount found, it should be based on their rarity. Such as you will find iron and stone in the highest quantities. Silicon, Magnesium, Nickel, and Cobalt are of intermediate rarity. And lastly, Silver, Gold and Platinum are rare and precious. Just use common sense. Don't be this person:

Way too much uranium and refined goods. NOTE: Large amounts of ingots (though not like that) might be balanced on 1x assembler efficiency. However not everyone plays on it. If I were to balance it for 1x, 10x players get a crap load of gear, and if I balanced for 10x, 1x players would be starved for items. So I personally would balance loot for 3x settings to meet in the middle.

Now a nice touch to add would to make the type of cargo match the ship it's on. Such as a mining ship should mostly have unrefined ore and maybe a few ingots and components. A manufacturing ship should have mostly refined goods, and cargo ships should have mostly components. Military ships get more ammo than normal, and general purpose ships and stations should have a little bit of everything.

I can't tell people how to build their ships because everyone develops their own style and build quirks. But I do recommend that you use light armor blocks instead of interior blocks for walls as the sides of interior blocks massively inflate your ships triangle count.

-Lighting
If you are using ceiling mounted lighting, be sure to not overextend their brightness as this can happen and make your ship look dimmer.
You can increase the radius of a wall mounted light more than a ceiling mounted one without the light "bubble" clipping though the floor. This issue is particularity noticeable when you have 1 block tall passages. In those passages, do not increase a celing mounted lights radius past the 3.6m default as it will clip though the floor.

Avoid using many spotlights for performance reasons.

As this post from Gotlag[forums.keenswh.com] illustrates, even a ship with relatively plain hull geometry can look great with a proper paint job. No more all grey or mono color ships! A few well placed stripes can make a ship look a whole lot better.

Before you panic, a decent paint job isn't that hard to make. You do not have to do anything fancy like the ship above, just mimic the stock ships and you'll be fine. Examine the vanilla ships and stations. All of them have two of these three components in their paint job:

-Base Color: Either the dominant color of a ship or the one it identifies with. Such as the commercial cargo ships are mostly white but have blue on them. That blue catches your eye more than the white so you would identify it as blue.

-Secondary Color: A second color that complements the base color by bringing it out or adding contrast.

-Highlight Color: Typically a stripe that is usually light color on a ship or a dark color if the ships base color is very light like yellow or a faded color.

Red 1 Has all three, a red base color, a black secondary color, and white highlights. The Easy start 2 station has a green base color with white highlights. Blue 2 and the small ships on easy start 1 have a blue base color with a white secondary. The rescue ship and mining cargo ships are yellow with a black highlight etc... Notice how the secondary and highlight colors are always black and white. Since black and white are neutral colors they don't clash with anything, meaning if you were to change the red on Red 1 to blue, green, purple, orange, etc... it'll still look fine. So as long as your faction has a single or main color it identifies with, it is compatible with this color scheme. Yes, grey in a neutral color too, but I don't recommend using it as a secondary or highlight color. Since it is a mix of black and white, it does not have the sharp contrast of white or the "bringing out" power of black, leaving it dull in comparison. The stock ships use grey for the interior blocks used as flooring as well as ramps and stairs. Everything else should follow the ships color scheme inside and out as closely as you can! An all grey ship or interior can bore an explorer quickly.

By heeding the advice of this guide you can ensure that your submissions for exploration wave 2 and beyond will not invoke Sturgeons Law, and explorers who happen upon your creation might utter the phrase; "Wow. This person cared."