Utterly Mad

Ok, after two days of falling on my ass drunk, and one morning of a very long, very needed nap, I'm back up and running. To continue with ships

Speed: How fast a ship can move, not including FTL speed.
Manoeuverability: How quickly a ship can change directions, how well it can evade attacks, etc.
Scanning: How effective the ship is at detecting things.
Shields: Shields are fairly self explanitory. In the FTL universe, they are an extension of the same sorts of technology that powers FTL travel. The basic concept is that they work by altering the mass of an incoming object enough that it cannot harm the ship. Accordingly, some weapons (like a macrocannon) can be stopped by them. Other weapons (such as lasers) cannot, and must be stopped via armour. Mechanically, each "shield" can stop one hit. A ship with a shields rating of 2 will accordingly eat up two hits.
Armour: Protects a ship from damage. As with shields, some weapons are good vs. armour. Others, not so much. Mechanically, armour reduces the incoming damage by whatever it's value is.
Hull Strength: Act as hit points. They represent the ship's interior design, bulkheads, blast doors, etc. etc.
Power: How much power a ship produces. This is essential to keep things such as the bridge, shields, weapons, or other bits of tech operational.
Mass Limit: Defines how much stuff you can stick into a ship. As well as having a power requirement, weapons, tech, etc. all have mass.
Turrets: An abstract representation of the ship's small defensive turrets. These are used for stopping torpedos, small craft, etc.
Weapon Layout: How many weapons a ship can carry and where they need to be located.
Points: How many points the hull itself costs. Upgrades, weapons, and tech, also have a point cost.

Beyond those "fixed" ship stats, there are also a few other things to know, number-wise:

Crew Compliment: Warpships are BIG, even smaller ones. Generally, they have a crew compliment that is more on par with the population of a small city rather than a naval ship. The actual number of people on board doesn't matter much from a ship performance perspective, but the percentage of crew who are capable and able to perform their duties does. A rough breakdown of the negative potential effects as your crew population dies or is otherwise incapacitated:

100% - Obviously, this is idea;. No ill effects
80% - The ship's top speeds degrade, in and out of combat. How much depends on the hull class.
60% - Boarding actions, hit-and-runs making repairs, and similar actions (though not maneuvering or firing weapons) face a -5 penalty.
50% - The ship gets a -10 penalty to maneuverability.
40% - The ship suffers a penalty to firing weapons. The seriousness of this depends a great deal on what sort of armament is being used, but typically this will range from -5 to -15. Additionally, any bonuses applied by special components are lost.
20% - In combat, the ship counts as Crippled.
10% - The ship can no longer perform boarding actions or other actions that logically require having free crew. It is now barely functional, and there are not enough people to effectively fight fires, make repairs, etc. There is a -20 penalty to those sorts of actions.
0% - If you somehow are not yet dead, you should be trying very hard to get off the ship. There's no one left to run the atmospheric controls, and you're going to end up suffocating if you don't freeze to death first. The ship has basically bled out at this point, and is not able to be operated unless more crew are brought on board.

Besides Crew, Moral is a fairly important factor. I have a table for the effects of low moral as well, but it is quite a bit more randomized and not worth reproducing here. In short, having low moral is not a good thing, and you will face mutiny if things are bad enough. If a mutiny does happen, you can deal with it however you see fit, but bear in mind that there may be unforseen consequences to your actions.

Ok, so, that's the basics out of the way. As I said the other day, we'll deal with actual combat when the situation arises - there's a lot of potential rules, and I'd like to get a feel for how things will play out before I set any in stone. It might be that a simplified system ends up being the way to go, or it might be very complicated. I will touch a bit on how damage works, just so that picking out weapons makes a little sense. Weapons have a couple different stats:

Strength: The max number of hits a weapon or battery can land on it's target. The degrees of success system applies to ship combat as well - in this case, succeeding will mean a hit. Each individual degree of success will mean another hit, up to the weapon's strength limit.
Damage: How much damage a weapon deals. Obviously, this applies only in terms of ships - getting hit with even the weakest of ship-to-ship will kill any character outright.
Damage Type: Whether the weapon deals physical, energy, or some other form of damage. Typically, physical weapons such as rail guns and other projectile weapons can have their shots stopped by a shield. Energy weapons generally will not, though they will do lower damage to represent a ship's armour absorbing much of the energy.
Critical: How many degrees of success are needed to score a critical hit. Unlike most depictions of space combat, it's pretty rare to actually completely destroy a ship - instead critical hits will typically wreck components, depressurize sections, start fires, etc. etc.
Firing Arc: Which direction the weapon may be fired in. As a rough example, here's the arcs for a range-four weapon:



Range: The effective range of the weapon. Since things set in motion in space will generally stay in motion until they hit something, you can fire at targets beyond the range rating, though at a penalty. For the sake of gameplay, you can only fire a weapon up to twice it's range rating.
Mount: Some truely massive weapons require a spinal mount. Others are only effective as broadside weapons. Some will fit and function pretty much anywhere.

This more or less covers the important basics you need to know when designing a ship (assuming you guys still want to). I'm going to provide an example ship, as well as some example weapons and components - as with your personal gear, the universe contains many different devices that do the same thing, so you can call stuff whatever you like. Anyone is free to submit a design - you guys will then figure out what you like best, and I'll likely use the others as NPC ships or something you can find later.

I'm going to take a quick break here to go update in Azmodal, then I will post the examples. I don't think there's anything else to really know about right now, so ideally, I will have a first IC post for you guys up very shortly as well, and we can get this thing started.