A ship is a mobile Interactable Base that can Dock in other interactable bases, travel through space, and be moved around within a port. Ships are built within a Shipyard and follow all rules of interactable bases.
Operating a ship will require a Bridge facility to be built within the ship. The bridge grants access to all of the Navigation jobs to move, undock, and dock. Engine Room Facilities provide the capability of installing Ship Engines into the ship which will enable flight.
The Bridge facility has no requirements at this time other than to exist. There is no equipment to install nor is there any value in having a larger bridge than necessary. It is always suggested to build the smallest possible facility to act as a bridge.
Building multiple bridges on one ship is possible, but not recommended. All navigation jobs will lock a ship, so two bridges will serve no purpose other than to have two separate job queues, which could be maintained using Job Groups.
Engine rooms allow installation of Ship Engines. When a ship navigation job starts, any engine rooms that are selected for that job will be locked down and all engines within those rooms will be used for traveling. If a specific engine is selected from within an engine room, the engine room will still be locked down.
Building multiple engine rooms on one ship is encouraged. This will enable players to install or uninstall engines in parallel. Additionally, having multiple engine rooms can allow players to service one engine room while using a different engine room for flight.
Only ships can dock within other interactable bases. To dock, the port must have a Docking Bay that can adequitely fit the ship.
A docked ship is logistically connected to the port which enables transferring ships and cargo between bases via Logistics Hubs and Marketplaces. Many jobs, like Equipment Installation, can also source equipment from any connected cargo bay.
Ships can dock in any public or private docking bay provided they adequitely fit the ship. Private docking bays, owned by you, are free to use have no additional requirements. Use of Public Docking Bays will incur usage costs set by the owner of the docking bay.
Ships follow all of the rules of interactable bases and therefor share the same composition as an Interactable Base. This means that any facility or capability that exists on a Station can exist on a Ship. The primary difference between how these entities are built is that a Shipyard can be used to build facilities on a Ship while an Administration Center is used to to resize and remodel a station's structure and size.
At this time, Ships cannot be resized once they are initially built. In future updates, it is unlikely the case that this will change.
Shipyards are facilities designed to help build ships more efficiently, but are only required when you want to build a ship from scratch. Any ship with an Administration Center can zone plots into Construction Zones at any time, and those construction zones can build out facilities and install equipment.
The main benefit of a shipyard is that construction and logistics drones can remain installed in the shipyard and operating on the ship's facilities. This can be easier to manage than having to install individual drones in each facility that needs to be built out.
One of the most intricate parts of Celestial Frontier is the idea that ships, stations, and any other interactable bases that exist in the future (Planetary infrastructure, probes, dyson spheres, whatever comes to mind) share the same composition of having Plots, Partitions, and Facilities. These constructs allow for a large amount of customization. The one current drawback of these systems is that player built ships are simply one large plot.
In the future, the plan for ship building is to replace the current way of creating ships, which is to specify the size manually, with a blueprint system.
L-systems are often used for procedurally generated plants. The idea behind using a L-system for ship blueprints is to constrain the users from being able to specify a perfect setup for their needs. Instead, players would create create and iterate on blueprints to enhance them to be more optimal for their needs.
A unique ship blueprint would be created by Clones. More intelligent clones may create blueprints with more capabilities (eg larger ships) or iterate on bluerpints more quickly. These seed blueprints would have a specific size and a variable number of plots. Each plot would have a varying amount of externally facing space to use, so not every plot could support Docking Bays or Engine Rooms.
Ship blueprints could then be iterated on. Players would have some influence on the direction of the iteration (larger ship, smaller ship, more plots, or more external facing area), but the results of the iteration would be somewhat random.
Creating extraordinarily large ships would require a significant amount of blueprint research and iterations. These blueprints would become more and more concrete as the iterations occur, so they will begin to take shape as their own model of ships.