Choose your ship design using the Hangar. Gimbal provides several stock designs from which to choose initially. You are encouraged to tweak and modify these designs to gain an advantage in the game. At its core, Gimbal is a ship building game, so you will want to use the Designer to create designs that are far more capable and powerful than the stock designs.
You are always limited by budget and rank. If a ship uses parts that are beyond you rank, it will be unavailable to fly or edit.
Enemies you destroy in combat will show up in the hangar as "stolen" designs, for you to utilize.
You may also share your ship designs with the whole Internet. All Gimbal ship designs are stored as PNG image files in the Gimbal/Hangar folder of your PC. Share these images on the Gimbal Forum. You can simply drag a design image from your browser into the Hangar Folder, and the ship design will become available in your game.
The Hangar may be accessed during a game through the game menu (Press Esc), or by clicking your ship damage readout on the in-game HUD.