Hear hear. I could probably spend as much time with a fully-unlocked ship designer as with the game itself.
This seems like an appropriate thread for more ship designer ideas, so here goes:
1. Use the keyboard to rotate, zoom, and pan the ship in the designer. Having to keep going to the widget in the corner to do that gets annoying after a while.
2. Exporting the completed ship models to .3ds format or something like that for us geeks to render them in a more professional renderer...
3. Not sure if this is a real problem, and I haven't gone back to see if it really is the case, but it seems that you cannot save more than one ship design with the same name if they are built when playing different races. For example, if I play as human and design a "Fighter Mk1", then play as another race, I cannot create another "Fighter Mk1" without overwriting the other one. Maybe keep each race's designs in their own subdirectory?
4. Button to just clear all non-structural elements (lasers, shields, modules) from the design. I think I saw this suggestion elsewhere, but it seems good enough to repeat...
5. A "Sort by size" button in the parts list.
