This is very well done!
Facinating reading and interesting designs.  I like it!! 8-)
The big ships with level 2+ shields looks very formitable. Here in Jacksonville, my friends have stopped using Sields on their ships and we have all remove piercing from all weapons.  Too often, on the first threshhold/damage check they have rollled a 1 or 2 on the shield roll and the ship was then vulnerable for the rest of the game.  Have you had that problem and how have you dealth with it?
My personal naval type ships never had shields, but use ablative armor.

Here it is--the Veiled Serpent. Now with correct Carnalim ion array range...:)

EDIT: removed file, new version of The Veiled Serpent is below.

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I remember you asking me that the last time...:)

I design my ships to try and be as fun to play with as possible, and long-range slugging matches, in my mind, aren't that much fun (and it sometimes feels like power-gaming to me, which I'm not a great fan of). I know your group does, and thats good, but they don't give much variety in ship design, IMHO.

And then there's my own signature of having some race that is either more powerful than the others (in this case, the Aalkeri and Xevaxan), less powerful, or both (my Interregnum had that with the Lohvalik and Foralan, IIRC). If the baseline ships are all armed with range 18, that leaves advanced races with little room to have ranges that indicate "You really don't want to mess around with us"

If you don't like short-range brawlers, you probably hate my Assyria Six setting--maximum range 15, with standard ranges of 3 to 9, but then I was going for a truly low-tech feel.

Hmm, maybe...

An important consideration for me is that the maximum size of the board I can utilise means that even with these 'slow' speeds, the ships enter weapons range in about one or two turns. And that means more weapons, which in turn means quicker battles.

Another consideration is that, due to time constraints, I tended to use Starmada primarily as a basis for designing ships to convert to VBAM, which at least allows you to game without turfing the family out of the living room for a few hours. In that, engine speeds didn't really affect the conversion process, so ships tended to be speed 1 (!), so speed 2 seems fairly quick for me...:)

Another thing to consider is that these are the brawlers of a fleet. There are faster vessels in each fleet (although the Olhaz really are slow--their fastest vessel is speed 3, but their fighters were meant to be an integral part of the fleet)