Designing ships is very important to victory in this game. You can create new ships or upgrade the existing designs in the shipyard (the upgrade option when clicking on a ship will only bring it up to a different design). If you are unable to place anything on any ship design, make sure that you remove the parts that are already on it because most of the time older weapons and various systems take up far too much space to be efficient. Generally concentrating your research on a particular weapon type, defence type and engines is the fastest way to get better ships. Miniturization and advanced hull research will become very important soon as well.

Once these ship designs are saved you will have the option to build them at planet with starports or upgrade other ships of the same hull size to them out in space.

and what about the tutorials? just watch/listen to them and you should get all the stuff you need, you can even find the tutorials (sound only) in the folders not sure where but i'm sure its there

Ah, if you upgrade from a core design, save it under a different name. If you use the same name it will try to overwrite the design and it won't let you save over core designs. I didn't get from your original post that saving was the problem.

You can upgrade from the core ships if you want, or just start from scratch, either way, everytime you upgrade a ship model, give it a different name when you go to save. What I do is design a base model with the extras but no functional parts. Then when I tac on whatever technology I might happen to have I call it say: Defender 1-0. Then say in a few turns I get a higher laser tech, I choose that ship, go to upgrade, put new lasers on, and save it as Defender 1-1. You'll notice the AI uses a similar designation for its ships. I normally would delete Defender 1-0 afterwards, or you can obsolete it if you want it saved for future games, but you will rarely have the same exact combination of technology at the same time again.