I played the demo first and made some ship designs. When I purchased the full game, I first deleted all of my old designs from the battle deployment screen, then went to the design screen to build some ships that were more appropriately gratuitous.
However, the game now crashes to desktop every time I enter the ship design screen. The crash occurs as soon as I click the button to go to the design screen, whether I go from the main menu or from the deployment menu. I can only assume that not having any pre-existing designs causes the crash, since that seems to be the only difference.
Both the demo and the full game were version 1.27 when I used them.
EDIT: I was able to resolve this issue on my machine by deleting all local game content and redownloading the game from Steam. This made Steam recreate the tutorial fighter/frigate/cruiser designs, and I can now enter the ship design screen without error.
Would this bug also affect the actual battle as well? I recently purchased GSB on steam, I can launch the game fine, and even start the tutorial and align my ships, however when I go to either enter the battle or ship design screen, from any place, the game stops working, however I receive no data in the errors.txt file and I have not modified the default list of ships. There were also no relevant errors in the event viewer. I can provide more information if need be, just let me know what is helpful.
That sounds like something else. It might be worth entering the options screen and basically disabling everything, and seeing if the battles then work. It could be related to shaders, or some other visual effect.