I found the regular ship builder to be a good way to trial a redesign. You can load blueprints for a bunch of ships, modify and test fly them. If you have the materials you can buy the design as a new ship or just get the base ship and your tools and get cracking.
Honestly, I think I’ll revisit this around Xmas. 
Patch notes for today's hotfix:
Hello everyone and thank you for joining the Starbase Universe! We're aware of many issues troubling you at the moment. We're working on resolving those as soon as possible. We have processed thousands of in-game ship refund requests and our support team + extra hands continue to try to help out as fast as we can.Today's update is our third hotfix since launch and will bring the game down for approximately one hour maintenance, here is the change log:
Patch type: Hotfix
Fixed Ship Shop Ship thrusters getting auto-named when entering Easy Build Mode
Added system message when receiving mail
Allowed only Modules to be placed while in Easy Build mode
Fixed Easy Build Mode deleting ships in some cases
Known issues
We are aware of multiple issues around the launch, including the Steam crashes. For the most up-to-date information we suggest joining the Discord and checking the announcements.
In case you continue to run into any bugs that e.g. break your ship, or your ship gets lost due to bugs and you can't afford a tow, or are simply unable to tow it back, please submit an F1 ship refund request in-game, and our team will try to help you out as soon as possible.Thank you for your patience while we fix things, and sorry for any problems you might have run into. More updates are on their way!
Honestly, I think I’ll revisit this around Xmas. :-)
I'm holding off as well. I'm neck deep into Crowfall atm anyway. Give this more time to bake.
For about the past 3 days the core issues with the game have been fixed.
- Origin 1 is stable
- No issues with attaching stuff to your ship
- No erasing flight computer configurations and Yolol chips if you take a ship into the Easy Build Mode
- I havent seen any crashes myself and haven't heard many complaints.
So now we're past the stuff preventing play and into 'ok now what actually is the game?'
For me it's been mostly a ship designer. I start and scrap a bunch of different ideas without ever actually building any 
A lot of that is just me learning how things work. It takes a lot of work to get from a blank slate to a testable thing. That makes me far more impressed with the designed ships you can buy. Some are really ingenious.
I took a break from that this morning though and got a Marmot, slapped 2 mining lasers, an ore collector, and a resource scanner on it and poked at some rocks. This went really well. 2 mining lasers is a lot of energy but they really burn through the rocks fast. Next I want to try and extend the cargo capacity of it and maybe make it a bit faster when full. We can't measure speeds yet because the player-run ISAN navigation network hasn't been finished for the new Early Access 'map'
I spent the past week designing a 'ring' style mining ship, the Immunnaeechuu I, and printed it on Sunday. It cost 750k in assembly and hundreds of stacks of ore, so its going to take a while to pay for itself, but its pretty awesome.
Pilot player has tools and code to help line up an asteroid, they approach and stop with it in the center. Then the Miner player takes over (or the pilot runs over) and aims the lasers at the asteroids. 2 ore collectors suck up all the goodies, pulling the former asteroid, now pebble pile, in half. It has 100 ore crates and can travel about 100 m/s empty, 80 m/s full.
There are 4 engine rooms, one at each compass point and almost 300 batteries to power 24 lasers. Connecting it all is one long hallway that you can take an infinite jog on
Pics!
That's ridiculous. I love it.
And here I am over here thinking I'm doing well just trying to improve a Marmot-ST...
And here I am over here thinking I'm doing well just trying to improve a Marmot-ST...
You and me both, brother. 
This is amazing polypusher!
Thanks!
I revised it with a tractor beam pair crossing the middle of the ring like a crosshair. They snag the rock as it drifts (if I aim right on approach) by and slowly tug it into position where the 24 lasers just obliterate it. This cuts way down on all the time spent making the rock bob all around inside the ring and energy used shooting the lasers ineffectively.
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