I'm still getting the hang of designing myself, but I'll put down what I've learned so far.
BEFORE ATTEMPTING WEAPON/EQUIPMENT DESIGN:
- Make sure you have plenty of credits, preferably in the hundreds of millions. Research costs are pretty steep for designing weapons and equipment, depending on the stats and the resources being used.
- Minerals, minerals, and more minerals. Discover and fully research as many different mineral types as humanly possible, and keep a stockpile of as much of each as you can. You never know when you're going to need something you previously thought to be useless. The different minerals you have in your possession will make or break whatever you try to design.
- Note that designing different unit chassis is a lot easier since there's no plethora of resources to assign to each part of your design. Just pick whatever mineral has the most hardness and use it.
THAT BEING SAID: here's how to design your first component.
1. Decide what kind of weapon/component you want to use. From my experience it's easier to develop projectile weaponry, but it depends on the minerals you have access to.
2. Before deciding on the stats, select a mineral for each part of your component. If you spend a lot of time specifying the exact details of your component and then find out you don't have minerals that match the requirements, you'll be pissed.
3. While deciding on what mineral you want to use, click on each dropdown box and then look at the mineral attribute list on the right side of the design interface. You'll see some highlighted in green and others in red. Green means that you need a mineral with a high value in that particular attribute. Red, as you might expect, means you need a mineral with a low value in the specified attribute. As a general rule, pick yellow/green values for the green highlighted attributes, and red values for the red attributes, and you should be good. Designs are not flexible at all with high values in low attribute slots and vice versa, so be wary.
4. After finding the right minerals for each part of your design, you can specify the stats and design specs for the component. If you're confused as to what the average number is for each numerical statistic for that specific kind of component, go to a research lab's build/research screen, find the design of a component that's in the same category as yours, and click "view results". This will take you to a screen where you can look at the attributes.
5. Once everything is specified, click the design/redesign button. After the cycle completes, you can use the view results button to look at and correct any problems your scientists ran into, or raise/lower attributes (which is a good idea if your research/production price for the component is too high). Once the component is designed and you're happy with what you see, click 'research'.
Congrats! You've made your first component. :) Sorry if any of this is confusing, I just wrote whatever came to mind.
