Ship Building Hit Points

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Hit points= increased with some high level hull tech's, or by levelling up individual ships. It's a fixed amount.
Cost increases, I have built ships that cost over 1200 to build. This is nothing to do with any of the things you mentioned, but rather different ship designs are more advanced and cost more. Some later weapons cost more than 60.

I'll have to look for the High level hull tech's, I'm just not sure where those would be or how to get them. I just find it a little puzzling - I have a ship (which my civ found) that has a Hit Point rating of 42 and weapons that I know are more than the 60 cost that I have. I would like to be able to acheive this as well when I'm building ships whether it's through advanced research or whatever. Just not sure at this point how to about it. As to the ship cost - how do you get a ship that cost 1200 to build? I understand that this could be the result of advanced tech. or advanced ship designs, but where are those? How do I get to those levels of design? Right now, I have weapons that cost 45 - 50 but I really can not put them on a new ship when my cost level is at 60.
It sounds like I need to play the game more to discover these things but I'm at a point in my current game that I can win and I'm trying to learn has much as I can with this game so that I can move on to the next "level" of game play.

Thanks for the help.

Er.. That 0/60 you see? That's actually the available SPACE you have.

A component might cost 45 or 60 or 120, but the space it takes is a seperate value, also listed.

Yes, cost is different from space requirement, is different from damage/defense. Early in the game, the way to boost hitpoints is to send fleets in against unarmed freighters or starbases. A player can also pick off individual ships guarding a planet, until the enemy builds an orbital fleet manager. There is a big advantage to attacking with 1.1 (may change with next release).

Later in the game, there are two techs that help with hitpoints, and there is the Xinthian (sp?) hull plating a trade good wonder. None of these is as good as veteran fleets winning lots of battles, later upgraded to better tech ships. Vets that last the entire game, sometimes have double or triple the hitpoints of new ships. Best way is to retreat damaged ships and avoid nasty fleet battles if possible.

To elaborate, space determines how much you can fit on one ship. The maximum space available is based on your hull size, modified by your miniaturization ability (this actually increases availalbe space rather than decreasing the space requirements of components as the name would suggest). The 0/whatever bar you see is the amount of space used/total. Each component takes up a certain amount of space, which scales so that they take up more space on larger hulls. Cost determines how many units of military production a ship takes to build (also how many bc it would cost to buy, but this number is much larger than the listed cost). Cost is also based on components (including hulls), I'm pretty sure it doesn't scale up with larger ships, and is not limited in terms of how expensive a ship can be. Hit points are determined by hull size as well as any civilization hit point ability you have.

The technologies for larger hulls are all on one path of the tech tree, branching off from basic logistics and continuing through advanced hulls, medium scale building, etc.

Sorry, that was my mistake, you guys are correct. I'm say the wrong thing when I'm referring to cost, that part I do understand. So, back to the question, how do you increase this number from 0/60, the space size, to something larger?

This explains a lot. I've concentrated mostly on economics and influence and have only built a defensive force. I have not researched those areas that would have the advance tech. that I would need to increase some of those items for better attack options. At this point in the game that I'm playing, it does not appear to be to my advantage to attack anyone - their ships are quite a bit stronger than mine. I have a feeling I will get clobbered. It's best to continue with increasing my Influence throughout the universe.

Thanks for the insight guys!

The "space size" can be increased by researching miniaturization. The description is that components are smaller, but the way it does this is to increase the overall size for components. So if your ship has 60 "size" points, and you research a 15% miniaturization level, then you should have 69 "size" points. And so on.

I also have a question about hit points. // When I create my own ship design via the shipyard, no matter what hull size I choose I only get one hit point. Yet the new ships I get via research have higher hit points (six and 10). ==> So, how can I increase the hit points on the ships I create myself? // Thanks.

yes the cargo hull has allot of room for equipment but the compromise is that it only has 1 hitpoint. You have to design ships using the small hulls with hardly any space for equipment - until you eventually research larger hulls.

Make sure you haven't accidentally picked the tab on the hull palette that limits the list to only Cargo hulls. You should have access to Cargo, Tiny, and Small hulls from the very start of the game, the latter two of which have more than 1 HP.