Editing Quickstart for Beginners (section)

== Adding Shipyard Production Orders ==

The next tab to go to is Manage Shipyards.  This is where you will build your ships.  If you let the computer design your first ships then you can go directly to assigning designs to different shipyards.  It usually helps to open up the ship design screen (F5) to check what each ship does.

Make sure that when you assign them that the biggest possible design is given to each shipyard.  You do not want to have your largest shipyard capable of building 20000 ton ships working on 1000 ton gunboats.  The first time you assign a design to a shipyard it happens immediately, afterwards it will take some time for the shipyard to retool to build the new design.  While it is retooling you can continue to build ships that had already been started.  You will not be able to start any new ships until you finish retooling.

You can build any ship you want in the military (naval) shipyards. Only civilian designs can be build in the commercial shipyards.  Commercial/civilian designs tend to be much larger than military ships. Civilian shipyards start at 10,000 ton capacity and build up faster than military shipyards that start at 1,000 ton capacity.  Play around with what you want to build.  You will need one freighter design and one colonist design to start a new colony.  To survey for warp points you will need a Gravitational Survey ship (this is going to be a military design). To survey for minerals on the planets, moons, and asteroids you will need a Geological Survey ship (this can be a civilian design). To [[Interstellar travel|transit a warp point]] you either need a ship with a jump engine, or you need an existing jump gate.

To build a ship, click on the shipyard and then go to the create task area.  Choose which ship that this particular shipyard is capable of building and make sure that the task group the ship is being built in says 'Shipyard TG'.  If a ship is being built in a TG that has ships in it the ships can not move without changing their TG (task group).  Then click on the add task.  Each shipyard has a number of slipways, each slipway can build one ship at a time.