The only problem I have with designing SNE ships is when they are done and I want to come back to them for one reason or another. Although the weapon BAS is known as well as their traits, I usually fail to remember how many weapons I used for each fire arcs. With some training, I feel I could foun that, but at first, it was not easy.
Currently, I'm continuing designing ships for my own SFU/STU and that's pretty quick in the end.

Marc

I also added this to shipyard nova, it was a bit of a bother working out how many weapons were represented.

Paul

Well, I do hope Dan won't take this badly, but you asked for it..:)

Unlike with previous editions, there has been no hull chart of any sort to give the SUs, defence factor and thrust factor for at least some of the hulls. That means you have to calculate them yourselves. While I did do that for sizes up to hull 75(!), it still is on a separate piece of paper and not in the book. I realise space is the primary reason for this, but I do believe we could have lost something (for example, the timeline) and had a chart. While I realise I could have said this earlier, it wasn't at the forefront of my mind until I actually started to give it some thought, after the realisation I haven't done any ship designs (can you say catch-22?)

The weapon design process is slightly difficult, too. While the improved accuracy of the 2 d.p. for most traits makes it easier to differentiate different effects, it can lead to the decimal cascade effect where a weapon can have an initial SU cost (before arcs and # of weapons) of three or four numbers after the decimal point. This, combined with the inferred but not actually stated rule of rounding (is it rounded normally, or do you round up?), makes weapon design a tad difficult with P+P.

And the combined bogeyman of the armour defence score and defence score in total is a big issue. While it makes it excellent to give ships different defences, in the P+P design stage you now have three different numbers plus the equipment that affects the defence score. This makes it difficult to tinker with a design, which I tend to do (to see if I can fit more weapons or fighters, for example, or whether I can fit the current weapons on the vessel even with stronger defences).

Er, nothing. Its Pen and Paper...the way I (used to) do all of my designs...

For printing the chart, yes, for the time being--I don't have a printer set up, in the same way I didn't have a computer at home until about 30 months ago. And the library (the only place I could print anything off) is closed for a month for installing self-service kiosks.

Thats for the ship display, yes, but the actual design of the weapons (with the examples) have decimal points--the example at the bottom of the first column on page 47, for example, has a SU cost of 149.9 (which is rounded up from 149.85), but there are no examples (that I can remember) which has a initial SU of, for example, 146.841 that is rounded up to 146.9, or rounded normally to 146.8.

As for the last piece of advice, yeah, I know, but I prefer to use P+P because I can't really do sketches--the mind imagines a great design, but the hand, pencil and paper fail miserably. My art skills are rudimentary, to say the least... :oops:

Oi!  :twisted:   

Trouble is, I do doodle, doodle and doodle some more. I literally cannot sketch. Part of that is due to poor hand-eye co-ordination (my handwriting can be so bad sometimes I have trouble reading it, which does lead to some annoyance when going over some of my older SAE and SX designs), but the main part is just my complete lack of art skills.

I was joking about the pen and paper, I have sketches and notes everywhere (I seem to keep buying paper and note pads!) and don't get me started on pens.
It has been getting hard to find pens that are comfortable to use (holding thin pens/pencils hurts). Thank god for self amalgamating tape. I have started buying cheap pens where the body of the pen can have the middle pulled out and replaced with a new one. I have wrapped the tape around a couple of them to a thickness that makes them more comfortable to use and less likely to be dropped.
Paul