Where are the Small Ships?

In the current alpha the only pre-defined ship templates are for tiny hulls. For small hulls and up you have to design your own.

You have to design your own Small, Medium, Large, etc Ships in the Shipyard, before you can build them.

I must be blind. I can't find a place to design ships anywhere in my game. 

There are ships of all sizes in the game, but you need Small hulls and MassDriver to build a Gunboat.

In prior versions of GC3 you needed a Small Hull for the gunboat and then it would put the best kinetic weapon it had on it. That's what people are expecting here. I didn't do that because I wanted a Gunboat to be a Gunboat with specific stats and abilities not have one Gunboat with 3 attack and another with 26 attack.

Hmmm....

We could either:

1. Bring back the "place the best kinetic available"
2. Do a better job communicating "you need mass drivers to build this ship" (ie: the ship shows up disabled in your shipyard list with the tech prereq on it).

I probably need to give up on my idea of ships having specific stats and go back to placing the best available weapon.

Select to manage one of your shipyards. In the bottom right corner there's a + icon that if you hover over it says "Design Ship". Click it, and you're in the ship designer.

Once you're in the ship designer, there's another + icon in the lower left, two over from the button that says "Use Design" that has a "Create a completely new ship from scratch" tooltip. Click it to design a new ship.

That could be improved upon. That was a lot of searching. 

I very much like item #1 placing the best available. While it can be fun to optimize ship designs it's also a burden. I want the best firepower thats availae selectes for me and save me the trouble of nickel and dining every time I have a new tech.