2.0/Apocalypse by default disables player designed science ships. I feel like it's a much better way of doing things, so I will be discontinuing this mod.

Has anyone actually seen an AI use one of these?

If I did my stuff right, the AI should use it, but I make no guarantees.

The old version of the mod did seem to work in 1.8.1.

Update uploaded.

Testing shows that this still works fine in 1.8, so there'll be an update incoming tonight. Sorry about the delay.

Cool. I liked this mod a lot for 1.5, and hope to see it updated to 1.8 soon.

I haven't tested this for 1.8. I'll be doing that this weekend, and updating as needed.

What about completelly new FTL drives only for science ships

Any chance you could do a compatibility mod for NSC for the Science Cruisers?

Leaders assigned to ships is hooked to the ship type. If it's flagged as a science ship, it does science ship things. Flagged as constructor, does constructor things, etc.

As Peter34 mentioned, reduction in mineral cost would either be too good, or not good enough. Even with the same setting. Not to mention, adding in such a reduction could be a bit more complicated.

More Aux slots, tougher hull, faster speed are all possible. Build time might be possible, but I doubt it. Something I'll look into though.

I haven't had a lot of spare time recently, though, so I don't guarantee a time frame.

A Tier-2 Construction ship that has reduced Mineral cost to build what it builds is a bad idea. For normal stations it's a trivially worthless cost saving, and for Megastructures it's failing the "but would you ever NOT build one with a T2 ship then?" question.

Thumbs down.

I do like the idea of a Tier-2 Construction ship with more Aux slots, faster base speed, and so forth, but I doubt that it's possible to mod in the ability to have the ship crewed by a Leader, even though I've been hoping since 1.0 to see a new Engineer Leader type that is necessary for big projcts, not just Megastructures but also upgrading a Planetary Capital to an Empire Captial, and similar.

Is any chance to make a builder ship enchance? I mean, making leader, some perks and ship modification like build time\cost and etc?

Updated to 1.6

@dRuPpl - Ship Power Stations is compatible with this. From what I know, power stations are intentionally left off of civilian vessels.

Science module slots are based off of the ship's hull and not the sections, so that would have to be an entirely separate ship. Plus, last I tested, the science modules had some issues and weren't working properly.

"Civilian" ships also don't engage in combat. You can put weapons on them (I've tried!) but those weapons won't fire in "combat"

nice mod
some suggestions:
-add a second science module slot (maybe by research latter in the game)
-add compatibility for "ship power stations" mod
-add mybe a slot for point defence weapons

This new Science Ship "hull" is much more desirable than the vanilla one, so I think it's a mod design mistake to make the Tech required to use the new hull be tier-1. It should be upgraded to tier-2, and cost more Science points, so that it doesn't appear so early in the game.

Apart from that, I like it a lot.

Updated to Stellaris 1.5

While I can't add in component-based changes to survey speed, research-based ones work. I've added a rare tech that grants a +25% increase to Survey Speed.

I've been looking in to just such devices, and it turns out that they don't work. The bonuses appear in the component, but they don't actually do anything.

Yes, this means the Curator Archaeology and Curator Explorer labs don't do anything either. I've already posted a bug report on their forums, but that probably won't be fixed with the Banks update.

I know Survey Speed works as a technology modifier, so I may look into that. Might also see what other things can be done via research.

mayv=be a module thwt is an upgrade o the science lab, for survey, anomaly, and such?

Updated to 1.1: Added Miniature Wormhole Generators, Added Hyperdrive Optimizers, tweaked Sensor Boosters a little.