When designing a ship model, the most important question for it is "what is the purpose of this ship?" If you want to transport resources, build a transport. Later on, you will want to build "max" ships. This means with all the extra features and max volume or attack. Right now, you probably just want to design models that will get the job done that you have for it right now. Do not put and dressing on it. This means until you can better afford it do not put defense and attack on your transport(s). You probably only need one bigger than the 10k you start out with. You do however want piracy and hyperdrive on all transports you ever build. This allows you to take resources form other people's ships and jump instantly to any point in the galaxy. I only used invisible ships once, and I do not recommend them. You can not make a ship invisible. There is a ship model called invisible which is invisible. It has a small capacity so it can not be used for storage. I would not get them, especially when you are new.

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Ok, another question. And thank you Cork for your answers.
Is there any way to find green planets?

Oh yeah, and I post about clans in Diplomacy forum right?

The only way to find greens is to find a system they are in(you actually find the red planets), through warp, or just happen to stumble on them. Good luck with that last one. You could buy them from a player or somehow hack SL or a player's file with coords in them, but I don't recommend either ones that require a machete.

The Diplomacy Forum is the ideal place for clan tidbits.

__________________________
Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
Just when you finally make something idiot-proof, someone goes and builds a bigger idiot.
http://www.something.com

I've been playing for more than two weeks and waiting to "drop" out of the newbie arena into regular space, but nothing seems to be happening. I tried to obliterate a couple of my planets to get rid of chains, but that does not seem to work either.

Is there something else I need to be doing? I thought the switch was automatic.

Thanks.

It's been changed, I read it in the support forum. You can stay in there as long as you want. If you want to go into the real arena just go to your mission page and click the link to enter the real arena, in the mission details

Though I'm personally staying in it until I get a decent amount of defence on my hw.
I can have 500k with my 10 point shield.
if only my 500k I was E, though then again I wouldn't be able to build any ships without iron :\

What's the maximum range for a planet's sensors? Like for detecting intrusions and detecting nearby planets?

1k for nearby and intrusion is 250. This and many more answers can be found in Hope's Skylords Handbook.

__________________________
Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
Just when you finally make something idiot-proof, someone goes and builds a bigger idiot.
http://www.something.com

Should I obliterate planets in the same system as my home world in addition to planets that can be spotted using nearby? And should I leave multiple system planets elsewhere in the universe or try to keep all my systems single-planet?

I would keep planets in hw system until you get turrets on your hw and the other planets are not defended. I would recommend obliting single planet systems when killing chains. If you are active, you might want to oblit(leave or give to friend is recommended) planets to create single planet systems so you can use nearby to find more planets.

__________________________
Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with your Microsoft product.
Just when you finally make something idiot-proof, someone goes and builds a bigger idiot.
http://www.something.com

Planets can detect nearby planets from 1000 units away. Does this mean 1000 in any direction or does it use the distance between the two points? For example,

planet one is at 0,0,0.

nearby is at 1000,1000,1000..

According to my program thing, that's a distance of 1732 units.

Can planet one detect nearby, or not?