PSS2
The hull is a grid, and the game prints its size as T1 Grid on the ship card. A cell is either part of the hull or open space; rooms stand only on hull cells. Under the grid is the ship's cut-away view as the game draws it, at the game's 32 units per cell; the grid is placed on it by matching the hull mask. All 30 hulls of the 3 playable factions are here, up to ship level 10.
8 combos in the game data give a room a bonus for what stands next to it, and 2 of them ask for open space rather than a neighbour. A weapon needs a clear horizontal line of space to its right; an engine needs one to its left. Only the room's top cell counts for space on the left and right: a lower cell facing space gives nothing. Above and below, one cell along the side is enough. The line of space must stay clear all the way past the hull edge. A gap gives no bonus if the hull resumes farther along that row. A free cell inside the hull is not space. Neighbouring rooms must touch edge to edge and are counted one by one: two valves on the same side of a turret give two bonuses. The room carries the total: bonuses to the same stat add up, so those two valves read as one number, not two. Some bonuses take their size from the neighbour instead of the combo: a valve gives the percentage written on the valve, and an armour block gives its AR. Armour cover is not a combo, and the count above leaves it out.
Armour protects the rooms it touches, up, down, left and right, but not diagonally. There is no single "ship armour" number: each covered room gets its own AR from the blocks around it, so the panel says how many rooms are covered and with how much AR. A block of armour gets nothing itself, even next to another block: it is plating, and there is no stat on it to raise.
The panel adds up what the reactors give and what the rooms take, and shows the difference as it is. A negative balance is not blocked here, and nothing on the page is scaled down for it: which rooms stay powered in a fight is decided by the ship AI. Plan the balance you want, then set the AI in the game.
Every number over the ship comes out of the layout in front of you. SHIELD is the capacity of the shield rooms, CREW the crew seated out of the berths the quarters give, T1 Grid the cells taken out of the cells the hull has, ARMOR how many rooms are covered and their AR together, and the two caps are what the hull holds plus every storage room standing on it. HP belongs to the hull and does not move. The row of numbers never changes its composition: a ship without armour covers zero rooms, and zero is an answer rather than a blank. Damage, price and build time are absent on purpose. Damage needs an enemy, their armour and your ammo, and it is worked out in the damage planner; what a room costs stands on its own card, which opens over the ship from the corner of its tile. A room the link put where it cannot stand keeps its place and goes dim, and the line under the ship says what is wrong with it.
The layout lives in the address: the faction, the ship level, then every room with its place on the grid, and who sits in it and what stands in it. SHARE writes that address out in full, because while you build, the bar keeps the ship alone, so a reload never costs you the hull you picked. Send the link and the same ship opens, script or no script. DOWNLOAD puts the same things in a file: the ship, the rooms, the crew and the modules; UPLOAD brings them back. A room the chosen ship cannot hold, or crew and modules the game no longer has, are left out when the file is read, and the line under the buttons says how many. 43 room families can be placed on a top-level hull, and the game's own limit on each of them is the limit here. The palette carries one tile per family, at the top level the ship can buy, and a link holding an older level of the same room stands as it is.
The game does not sell a gun, it sells a weapons platform: the small one arrives at ship level 6, the medium one at level 8, and what stands on it is a Minigun, a Railgun or whatever else that platform can become. The palette skips the platform and offers its weapons, because the weapon is what you pick. A platform holds one weapon, so the guns of one platform share its place: take a Photon Phaser and the Minigun beside it goes dim, still reading 0/1, until the phaser comes off the grid.
A tap on a room opens its seats and slots. A room seats as many crew as it is cells wide, and a room one cell high takes neither crew nor modules: armour, lifts and vents stay empty. All crew aboard cannot outnumber the berths the quarters give, so a ship without quarters flies without crew.
Modules need the Modularization research, and the builder assumes the highest step your ship can reach. Before ship 4 a room takes none; from ship 4 up to 1, from ship 6 up to 2, from ship 8 up to 5 a room, and never more than the room is wide. Of the 25 modules, mines are explosives, barriers take the damage before the room does, sprinklers put out fires, and turrets fire at invaders. A sprinkler hangs under the ceiling; everything else stands on the floor in front of the crew.
PUBLISH publishes nothing by itself: it checks the ship, shows the row it would stand in on the layout gallery and asks. The gallery takes finished ships, so at least 95% of the hull has to be filled with rooms the game allows where they stand, and the same ship with the same crew and modules is not taken twice. A name is optional, and the screen that follows hands out one link that renames, replaces or deletes the publication. That link is kept in this browser and nowhere we can read it, so it is shown once; opening it brings you back here with the button REPLACE IN GALLERY, which puts the ship now on the deck in place of the old one and leaves its address, hearts and opens alone.