How do you keep track of all your ship designs?

I’ve had this game since beta, but I’ve only recently gotten into it because of winter break’s arrival. First off, I’d like to say I love it, but all my ship designs are starting to overwhelm me at the deployment screen. I was just wondering, how to you all keep track of your designs and what they contain. Do you use specific prefixes or suffixes like LRM for long range missile, SHD for shield heavy designs, etc., or do you just have them all memorized?

On a related note, wouldn’t it be great if there was some sort of filtering system/folder system for organizing your ships in the deployment screen?
E.g.
user created folders

[Shield Heavy]
        |__[LRM]
        |__[Beams]
        |__[MIRV}
[Armor]
        |__[blah]
        |__[blah}
[Blanced]
        |__[blah]

or a simple search function for modules installed on ships.

I prefix them with a letter to indicate the race (so I don’t end up accidentally overwriting ship designs for another race,) then the speed (I skip the decimal point, it messes up the load design screen), then a bit of info about the weapons loadout, then anything special

e.g.
T 034 5xCL 1xBL EMP
Would describe a speed 0.34 Tribe ship with five cruiser lasers, one cruiser beam laser, and an EMP beam.

A 008 8xMIRV TGT
Would describe a speed 0.08 Alliance ship with eight MIRVs and a target painter.

R 299 2xRocket
Would describe a speed 2.99 Rebel ship with two rocket launchers.

I used to also put in a couple of letters to describe the class of ship (Cr, Fr, Fi) but there’s no need now we can filter by class, and mostly the speed makes it pretty obvious anyway.

I find this is good enough - I usually know roughly what speed ship I want, and this naming convention orders them by speed. Scanning through the main weapons loadout makes it pretty quick to find exact the ship I want. I rarely bother listing whether a ship has shields or repair modules - that’s pretty obvious from the little picture you get.

My listings are a lot messier than this suggests though… As I’ve still got tons of old designs on the lists, such as from before I realised that using a decimal point in the name caused hassles.

I name my ships like this:

(race) (class) vague description

Eg:

(Empire) (Cruiser) Laser Shield Tank

Its still rather annoying when your’e saving ships. Would be nice if you could filter ships on save/load by race.

Agreed.

There needs to be some type of sorter.

This. When my current selected race is “rebels” I should see NO OTHER SHIPS when I hit “load” in the design screen.

When I hit “change” to load a new hull—I should never see hulls that I cannot load for that race.

Actually, what would make the ship selection dialog super-awesome would be if it actually showed you the race, class, hull, speed, armor, shields, cost, and weapons for each ship as you scrolled through the list. Make it so you could sort by any TWO of the above. Also make it limit the currently listed ships to the currently selected race(which would mean you could remove the race column). Then the “name” of the ship could be more like “Hedgehog”, or “Bullfrog”, or my personal favorite, “Moose Turd”. =D

Nuke…

I have to admit that I don’t get as in-depth as a lot of folk - my ship names tend to be “class names”, such as Corsair, Reaver (both small Rebel skirmish frigates), Nest (Alliance carrier cruiser), Jupiter (Empire command-style cruiser), etc. And I don’t mind paging through a few dozen designs on the deployment screen or the design screen. But hey, that’s just me.

I would modify this selection slightly: Make the list limited to a single race, defaulted to the currently selected race, but allow you to select different races to display. I tend to tinker, which often means I’m bouncing from one race to another (such as modifying all my skirmisher frigates across the board), and I would prefer to be able to skip across the race boundaries easily.

I like how dogthinker’s style sorts by speed, and makes it easy to see what each ship is from the title. I think I’m going to start using something along those lines. Right now, mine are just generalizations about the ship, such as Megaton Plasma Cruiser, Laser Cruiser, Missile Sniper Cruiser, Shield-heavy staple frigate, etc.

I name them in a similar way to dogthinker:

Reb-Cr-MeL-042-Valkyrie Mk5

  • race: Rebel
  • hull type: Cruiser
  • Role and/or main weapon: MeL-Short Range Laser - MeQ-Short Range Quantum blaster, BB-Beam ship generaly with mixed beams, BBE-same but with emp gun…
  • extra features: Ar-Armored, nS-noShield, Tr-tractorBeam …
  • speed: 0.42
  • Flavour name