Everything you want to know about Ships.

• Hull - Your hull is the key to making credits trading commodities. The larger the hull, the more cargo you can carry which means the more credits you can make per trade. The bigger the hull the less turns it takes to colonize a planet
• Engine - Control how fast you move throughout the galaxy. The higher your engines the less turns it will cost you to real space over distances. Your engines will also help you in combat in either chasing down an enemy or avoiding your enemy. Don't downplay the importance of engines as they will save your ship someday.
• Power - is what gives both your beams and shields their energy levels, and controls how much energy storage you have on your ship. Make sure you at least match the power level with your shields and beams or you may be under powered when under attack and will not be able to use your full beam strength or maintain shields under attack. Also to use warp editors it helps to have an excess amount of energy.
• Fighter Bay - controls how many fighters you can carry or deploy at one time. It also controls how well your navigation computer works. The higher your fighter bay level the farther your navigation computer can compute warp paths.
• Sensors - Controls how well you detect mines and fighters and enables your scans to be more accurate. This works best if your sensors are higher than a planet jammer or a ships cloak level.
• Armor - protects your ship from being destroyed when attacking or being attacked. Primarily torpedoes will do the most damage to armor. As your armor is damaged the more chances that you will have for overall tech damage.
• Shields - Protects your armor from being damaged. Energy will hold your shields up, but beams are the primary weapon against shields so if an attackers beam level is higher or you do not have the energy to support your shields, the beams will bust past your shields enabling the remaining beams and torps to penetrate your armor.
• Beam Weapon - Your primary weapon for busting through shields.
• Torpedo launcher - Controls how many torpedoes/mines you can deploy and carry. Torps are hugely useful in attacks as the torps are what does the most damage when attacking and busting armor.
• Cloak - is used to mask your ship from scans and hides your ship from a smaller cloaked ship. Its not 100% that you won't be detected, but it helps. Also when you try to send spy's to an enemy planet the spy uses your ship cloak level at the time you dropped them on the planet to try to sneak to the planet surface.
• ECM - Electronic Counter Measures are used to helps confuse incoming torpedoes,fighters and beams so all incoming attacks become less effective

Ship Classes - When buying your ships each ship is useful for particular things so you will find you will need many ships for different jobs. Don't just carry one ship as the more ships you have the better off you will be if you happen to lose one. Pay close attention to the min max levels when buying your ship so you can get the biggest bang for the buck. Also don't discount owning smaller ships, they are extremely useful in scouting out areas safely and if you lose them you don't lose your best ships. Hull size makes a difference when scouting, because hull size is what determines how many mines you hit

Emergency Warp Device - This is very handy if you are attacked. Depending on the size of your ship when your attacked there is a chance that you will automatically warp away. You can also manually use it to escape sectors where you get stuck behind sector defense or running away quickly from an enemy. But you will never know where you will warp to. It is a random place throughout the galaxy including SG's so it might be a good idea to keep more than one incase you get stuck a second time.

Escape Pod - This is your lifeline in the game. Forget an escape pod and your ship is destroyed, all your planets go independent your bank account is emptied and you are kicked out of the game for approx 3 days depending on settings.

Fuel Scoop - This allows you to scoop energy as you real space from sector to sector.