The ship designer, the one accessible from the main menu, works well enough for ship designing, but there are things it can't do. It can't factor in increases to hull capacity, and it can't factor in that many parts can be reduced in size. Near as I can tell, Crusade has techs that can increase the capacity of your hulls by 70%, and can reduce the size of weapons by 70%.
If there is some time to work on the ship designer, I would like it if the following can be added to the ship designer.
-Increase the capacity of hulls.
-Decrease the size of components.
-Reduce the costs of hulls and components.
-Increase the effects of different components, like increased ship speed or increased weapons range if you have a bonus.
-Anything else I may have missed.
Basically, I'm asking for the ship designer to be able design ships usable in mid and later parts of the game where the stats of different components are different. I want to be able to affect all the stats for whatever a game might change.