Hi,
I also like the idea and want it to happen.
For the blueprints, I\'d give each player a small portable computer - let\'s call it the player\'s PDA (Portable Digital Assistant) to save me some typing. When a player activates their PDA and selects \"ship design\", they get taken to a special building mode. This building mode would be mostly the same as we have now; except you wouldn\'t need to have any blocks in your inventory at all, the ship design only exists inside the PDA (and doesn\'t exist in space), and all the normal distractions that cause additional graphics lag (planets, stars, stations, asteroids, other ships, etc) wouldn\'t be displayed (e.g. maybe just have a blue background, the ship being designed and nothing else displayed). The PDA would also have other menus for ship building - e.g. to see a list of blocks needed to build it, to see ship stats (shield size, thrust, mass, etc), to see and adjust default weapon stats, etc. Of course the player\'s PDA would also have other menus for things that have nothing to do with ship design; like faction management, shop, chat, navigation, etc.
Once a ship is designed it\'d be a file inside your PDA. You\'d go to a shipyard and upload the design into the shipyard\'s computer and give the shipyard the blocks needed to make the ship. The factory would have a \"work area\", and would change whatever is in this work area so it matches the ship design. This includes building a ship from nothing, repairing/restoring a damaged ship, converting one ship into a completely different ship (e.g. park a titan in the work area, and then get the factory to add and remove blocks until it becomes a glorious Isanth VI) and also destroying a ship (e.g. converting a titan into a \"nothing\").
The shipyard would work in 3 phases (not including uploading the design to the shipyard\'s computer):
a) Analyzing. This would be about 60 seconds of the shipyard\'s computer flashing the word \"Analyzing\" on its screen while it actually does nothing. At the end of this phase the factory will tell you about any problems (e.g. not enough blocks to build the ship). The main point of this phase is to add a little realism (maybe the factory is warming up its whatsit re-jigulators), and to increase the time it takes for players to spawn tiny ships.
b) Removal. This is where the shipyard removes any unwanted blocks in the work area.
c) Building. This is where the shipyad adds any wanted blocks to the work area.
For removal and building speed; for large ships I tend to use symmetry and place 200 or more blocks with each mouse click (up to about 4000 blocks per mouse click). Often what slows me down is lag (both server lag and graphics card lag, especially when working on large salvager/AMC/missile systems due to the video card killing \"purple wobble frame\"). If lag wasn\'t an issue, I\'d probably be able reach a max. building speed of 5 mouse clicks (of 200 or more blocks) per second without too much trouble. In other words, humans should be able to build at a rate of 1000 or more blocks per second (especially if they don\'t need to spend time thinking/designing). A factory should be at least as efficient as a human; and therefore should also be removing or placing about 1000 blocks per second.
Note: Based on the above; a tiny ship would take about 60 seconds to build (due to \"analyzing\"); and a large ship with 1 million blocks would take 1060 seconds (nearly 18 minutes).
On top of this, I\'d have a list of publicly available ship designs stored in the shipyard\'s computer that anyone can use (and anyone can add their design to). I\'d also allow players to transfer files directly from their PDA to another player\'s PDA; so that (e.g.) you can transfer your ship design to the leader of an allied faction without giving your enemies any chance of getting that ship design. This also means that a player (with no credits or blocks) can create a ship design, and then trade their ship design to other players for credits and/or blocks.