OK, I don't do these "forum" things a lot, so forgive me if I've said something stupid or commonly said.

I got the game yesterday and so far what I've mostly done is play around in the ship editor (so much fun!). I found one bug, or at least I think it's a bug. On the default Small hull for the race that starts with the circular colonizer (the bug people, I think), one of the outer hardpoints on the bottom curve is not properly spaced. It's closer to the paired bottom hardpoint than its mirror. This is hardly noticable for compact ship designs but once you start throwing antennae and stuff on there it becomes much more apparent. Also, I made one ship for one custom race, then made another custom race with a different ship style. Well, the design I made for the first race is still available, but it uses the hull of the new race. The result looks like a huge pile of trash and scrap. Sure I don't have to use it but I plan to make a lot of custom ships and I'd rather not sort through big lists of non-compatible ones. It'd be nice if the shipyard would only display custom ships made with the currently active hull set.

I had some suggestions for the ship builder. It'd be really nice if we could automatically delete all attached items when removing a single item. I had to hunt around for about 10 minutes till I found a hardpoint direction modifier on one part I wished to remove. That brings me to my next suggestion. The hardpoint direction modifiers are kind of a pain in the butt to use and can really clutter the parts list. Maybe that functionality would be better addressed as a key or set of keys that would change the orientation of the selected ship part, rather than the hardpoint upon which it may be placed? That would also avoid the problem that noobs like I have, where I need to keep deleting and reassigning modifiers because I'm not entirely sure what each one does yet. I'd rather just be able to flip a piece with a keypress before placing it than have to fiddle around with hardpoints.

I'm using a 3rd party hardpoint mod/fix that I found in the downloads section, so I don't know if removing that might address some of my problems.

Oh, and one other question, how do I add custom portraits for custom races? I downloaded another and installed it as instructed but it doesn't seem to be showing up in-game.

Thanks, everyone!