I'm sensing some confusion amongst current/future backers about the procedurally generated ships. Like this comment for example:
Being a dev myself, I totally understand the fantastic idea that is a fully generated ship, especially when it comes to testing or having the ability to generate a 1000 cool looking capital ships in the blink of an eye as opposed to modelling every single one by hand (which would take forever and a day) and then constantly hitting the HDD to load these assets all the time.c. I LOVE customization in games, there has not yet been a space sim that has been able to satisfy my need to fully build the ship I want, can you go into a little more detail on how much you can play around with the builds of your ships?
I think the problem is that many are coming into this 'expecting' a certain type of ship or design (something they can relate to? Something they can play with? A common notion to space-sims like elite.. ) as opposed to just having one generated randomly for you and away you go. The proposed ship editor will ease their concerms but thats at a later date. Questions on specific details like cockpits and cargo-bays in particular could be problematic for a proc gen ship.
A quick solution would to simply proc gen a ship, calculate it's volume and then divvy up the volume like so.. 20% volume with be engines, 50% of it's volume will be cargo area etc etc I'm guessing your already doing something to this extent.. but these are stats only and not something the player can see or play with...
What is needed is perhaps some explanation on this topic to clear the waters I think, but it's hard. (I don't even think I've explained the problem that well myself...)
ps: Your method of creating capital ships is perfect. Is the same code used to create small ships? (which I assume will the type of vehicle most players would start with? Or was the intention for eveyone to start with a capitol ship?)