That\'s an interesting idea actually. Rather then build a new ship, just keep adding on to one (naturally, its ok to remove some stuff like hull bits). See how long it takes before you start losing practicality.
It occurs to me it would actually be rather compatible with my (only slightly tested admittedly) theory of building a ship.
0. Put your control core on a stack of random hull pieces 2 tall, and with 2 empty spaces in all directions so you don\'t get warped outside the ship when you exit it.
1. Start with some lines of the parts that will stretch most of the ship. Due to how energy generation works, power core lines are a good way to just make a set of \"ship asterisks\" to give a very, VERY basic idea of the ship\'s shape and get the overall dimensions down before you commit to making hull or something.
2. Make the rooms and large consolidated bunches of things like a shield core. Well, a little bigger one anyway. You should have made a small one during step 1. And the hallways between rooms.
3. Make more long parts. Get all the snaking parts of doom out of the way, for that matter. The various insides of your ship. Ideally, the internal structure of your ship should be a mess of wires so screwy it would give any sane engineer nightmares, full of knots of various parts tangled together in ways to avoid them touching a different tangle of the same part type. Start paying attention to the ship\'s shape.
4. fill in the rest with shields or engines or whatever you need. Maybe leave some empty areas in case a new part gets introduced.
5. Ok, NOW you can start putting a hull on the darn thing. Actually, no, screw that. I don\'t need no stinking hull. I\'ll cover it with WOOD. And FOLIAGE. It will be the branchiest, leafiest ship of doom ever.
Edit: Oh, right. The reason I suspect it would work well with my ship design theory is that as part of it, I always make power generators, the main guns, and stuff like that run just about the entire dimensions of the ship, so I can just widen it, lengthen it, or heighten it if I were to make it bigger. Which I would likely do before I finished actually \"clothing\" the vessel.
