So I love this game. Spent about 50 hours the past couple of week. But I think there is something missing.
My suggestion is to be able to slowly build ships with crew from other ships. Almost like the opposite of harvesting ships for resources, by having crew transport the appropriate resources to each block that needs to be built on a new ship.
How it could work is fairly straight forward. The ship would be designed as normal but then the ship stays a blueprint maybe at a dock at a station or something. The initial cost could be the amount of steal to make a skeleton of the ship, possibly.
Then the crew of your nearby ship could start transferring materials such as steel plates, coils, etc. to each appropriate block of the new ship and after the proper number of resources arrive at the individual blocks, it then gets built. Maybe a crew member then goes to that block containing all the raw resources and starts building it. There could be a blue glowing spark flickering on him like he is welding thr parts together.
I think this would make the game so much more interesting and give a purpose to gathering resources instead of just trading them other the stations all the time.