Can Custom Races use Custom ships?

If you create and save a custom race and establish your color scheme for the race, your basic ships will be the basic ships for the race you chose. From that point on you should be able to build and design ships tricked out any way you like. You will only be limited by the parts available (which will increase as the game gets closer to release).

As long as you save the game after designing your ships, they should be available for you anytime you play as that custom faction. In other words, If I build an X wing fighter as the Terrans, that ship will be in every future game that I play as the Terrans. The same should be true of any custom faction created. I can't guarantee it is working, but I can guarantee that is how it is supposed to work.

In the ship designer, pick new design. You can then pick any existing hull or just a starting cube and add parts to make it as beautiful or as goofy as you wish. If you plan to use the design with various weapon configurations, save it as a template and you can outfit it with different weapons and engines etc any time you wish. If it is njust a one time ship, fill it with weapons engines etc and save it. Templates and individual ships will be there for you each time you play as that faction

Hmm, I'm not following.  I guess what I meant is if I create a custom race and play them as an opponent can I get them to use custom ships?

You will need to play as that faction at least once and build some ships for them. Otherwise, they are just going to use the ships that the ingame designer offers them. They will not create anything new or unique on their own.. Once you build a few for them I am pretty sure they will use them. I know in GCII if I gave another faction a ship they would copy it and start producing it in quantity. Or so I recall

Umm, I think you could also do that through a mod though I'm still working through the various XML files. It appears in FactionDefs.XML the Factions have a ShipStyleSheet. Haven't looked at those yet.

Also if you look at the main menu there is a greyed out item that will in some future release enable you to use the ship editor outside the game to creat ships. presumabley combining these two facts you will be able to mod in custom races with there own ship hull designs at some point.

i think the question is can a custom faction be designed with its own unique set of ships rather then just copied from other ships

and you should be able to do this however it would require some modding and some of the tools i dont think are avaialable to us yet (but i really know nothing about ship design)

i think they mentioned that they want to do this but im not sure when they are aiming for with this

Weird, in GCII you didn't even have to Mod it, when you created a custom race there was a screen where you could go through and select base ship designs you'd made and assign them to the race. 

It seems like it would actually be a step backwards in functionality to not have such an easy way to go about doing this and having them use your ships was part of the fun of custom races to me.  So if I'm understanding right, this is not going to be nearly as easy to do this time around?

It maybe that once they enable the ship designer from the main menu there will be an option to save ships and add them to a shipstyle sheet so you can select them for custom races we don't know yet as the ship designer link is disabled from the main menu.