I've been keep track of some ship designer issues, and I figure this is as good a place and time as any to mention them.

First, adding to what you've mentioned in Issue 2: Wonky hard points--I find that sometimes the opposite takes place when you don't want it to.

For example, I've been playing around with creating bends and tubes by attaching several pieces and then angling them each by a few degrees and offsetting them closer together. If you add all the pieces at the start of this process, everything works out okay. But if you add something to the end of such chains of pieces, they sometimes align absolutely to the axes of the whole ship instead of to the piece your connecting to, which can be frustrating, for example, when building a wing. If you build a wing at a weird angle and want to add something to the tip, that component will not always carry the angle of what it is attached to.

I guess I'd prefer an alignment toggle: either an "align to the anchor point" or "align to the ship's axes." This way, you could have a choice between the two. In any case, when a hard point randomly points a component 13 degrees off-kilter, it is really annoying, and I hope it's a problem that can be fixed without hurting already-built ship designs (though I'd prefer it be fixed even if it messed up previous designs).

A few other issues:

1) Drengin Model 16: This model has what I believe are unintentional holes in the front of the model...

2) Grouped/Exported Component Outlines: Sometimes grouped and/or exported components don't display their outline as a whole group, but instead each individual constituent component will outline on mouse-over. Also, their outlines aren't included in group outlines (if an exported component is included in a group of components, the group of components will form a single outline with any constituent exported components not outlined).

3) Ungrouping Button Disabled: I've had intermittent issues ungrouping grouped components due to the ungroup button being unexpectedly disabled, which can sometimes be resolved by grouping and ungrouping other components, or by saving the design and reloading it.

4) Undesired Multiple Ungrouping: When grouping sections of a ship to reduce the part count being displayed, sometimes ungrouping one section will ungroup the next grouped section in the component list at the bottom of the screen. For example, if I group the 5 first components (say, Group A) and then the 8 components that were placed next (Group B ), when I ungroup Group A, sometimes Group B is also ungrouped.

5) Rotation Display: I've had intermittent issues with the set of rotation dials showing a thin line (matching the color of the dial) rotating perpendicular to the arrow on the outside of the dial. I didn't take a screen shot of it earlier, and I didn't have the problem today--If I get a screen shot, I'll post it.

trumpeter87 have you tried holding the shift key when aligning a part and it orients to the ship?  The shift key aligns it to the part not the ship.  I've had to use it on any circular part to get it to point out the correct direction.

I didn't know that Ed, thanks! That's wonderful.

As for the CTRL key, I could be wrong, but I thought that just placed the component at the cursor and not to any anchor... which does prevent it from acquiring any attributes from any other pieces because it stands alone.