If you're new to the game, here are some tips about building and micromanaging ships in cosmoteer.
Going from least to most "known" (in my opinion)
Ship design:
Doors. Doors are incredibly important. If you're a beginner, you probably want doors literally everywhere. Just keep in mind that the 200 credits per door can add up, and that doors make your ship more vulnerable to fire. Once you know where your crew wants to go with what, remove unnecessary doors.
Control centers let your ship move and target specific modules. In large ships, consider having multiple control centers. If parts of your ship break off and have no control center, the parts can still attack, but you will not be able to control their rotation or targeting.
Crew moves slower when: walking through non-corridor rooms, walking past eachother, and walking on 3 of the 4 directions of moving walkways. Because of this. Make sure you have corridors and make sure they aren't clogged up with people during combat. If you're struggling to keep your weapons armed, check your crew efficiency. See if they're slowed down somewhere.
Moving walkways can help your crew, but you may want to delete a few sections to let them get on or off the conveyors faster.
If your ship has equal or more reverse thrust than forward thrust, it will fly backwards outside combat. Add a few more forward thrusters if you want to face your enemy while moving towards them.
Be careful of missiles and cannons on your own ship. Factories, storages, and turrets/launchers all explode based on how much ammo is inside them. Because of this, you don't want to over-produce ammo and missiles, as they will explode bigger when destroyed. Reactors explode the worst, and energy storages don't explode at all.
With large ships, keep your reactors and other production safe behind interior armor or interior shields. Large cannon shots can pierce through rooms and corridors, straight into your reactors and other explosives. It's generally better for the cannon to die than the ammo factories behind it.
Keep at least some crew close to your weapons and engines. At the beginning of a fight, your crew will need to run from their rooms all the way up to your weapons. Reducing that "manning" time gets more important the bigger your ship gets.
Sectioning off your ship by placing armor or removing doors can be extremely useful, especially for missiles. It will stop the AI from trying to run across the ship, causing them to dedicate themselves purely to the tasks you want them to.
Broadside ships can be very strong because of their consistent burst. While 1 side is firing, the other side is reloading. Just make sure you can turn quickly, and be smart about which side is more damaged/vulnerable in combat.
The AI pilot will automatically slow down to meet their destination. If you want to move forward quickly, make sure you have decent reverse thrust too (as the AI will keep the forward thrusters on longer.)
Combat:
Destroy enemy weapons asap. If you're fighting a Cerberus or other ship with a powerful front, you might want to destroy some of its thrusters and attack it from the back.
Unless your ship is very, VERY maneuverable, do not hold right click during combat. Instead, right click the enemy once, and hold shift to set distance, rotation, and position. Doing this will let you set distance without setting position relative to the enemy.
Weapons get slightly more range when targeting a single module. Because of this, keep your weapons targeting at all times. (Using shift can really help with this)
Aiming cannons at enemy factories and storages instead of their turrets can help in many situations. Usually, destroying the storage or factory behind a turret can destroy the turret itself, and possibly cause a chain reaction and more fires.
Cannons and missile launchers do not directly use energy. Because of this, electro bolts will have almost no effect against them. Focus your electro bolts on other things like thrusters or energy weapons.
Tired of pesky point defense shooting down your missiles? Fire all your missiles in a salvo by selecting your missile launchers and setting them to hold position. Once they're all loaded, turn off hold position and turn it back on once all the missiles are fired. This makes your missile launchers explode bigger if they're destroyed, so watch out for that.
Ion beams are fixed. They will always fire forward/outward and cannot target modules. Because of this, you can't hit the same block with multiple ion beams (unless it's a big module, but that's unlikely). Use shift and change your ship rotation to aim them. If you have multiple ships with ion beams, you can use rotation and focus down a single spot. This tears ships apart insanely fast.
Misc:
If you plan on making your ship bigger, do it after a warp jump. You will probably increase the cost of the warp if you do it before the jump.
Along with FTL efficiency, your ship's mass will determine how expensive a warp jump is. A big ship with 100% efficiency can still cost more than a small ship with 70%.
If you have a destination selected, and not enough fuel to jump there, you can click buy, and the game will set the marker to exactly the amount of fuel you need.
Thinking about it now, I probably could've put this in ship designs. Meh
