Pywackt

Ironically, the ship design helps against that. The very long and huge cargo block the bulk of the ships HP, and because of the framework, I use many small thrusters spaced out, something to the size of 0.5 x 1.0 x 1.0 (Spread out, they're incredibly efficient.) The occasional shots will only take out some framework and a few of the thrusters, which are quite cheap to repair. (Iron and titanium in trinium territory if you can believe it) This is the starting model; later on I scale up once, and afterwards copy the whole thing without the engines then paste it to the front (or bottom/top/sides) Sorry about the colors, but everyone's ships are such ... somber death machines, all that black and red, really boring.

A few minor things about the trading/cargo UI. You open the trade system, see potential trades/buy/sells each with multiple pages. After trading, if the stock changes, when you go to the trade system menu again, if you were on a page that now has no lines (eg. trades list now fills 2 pages instead of 3 and you were viewing #3), it will show as empty. It's confusing at times. When you have many items in your ships cargo and traded a few, the list might show as empty, if the lines you were viewing disappeared. Sorting ship cargo by name. Between the large variety of goods found in salvaged stations/ships and gathered resources for turrets, it's kind of needed. A timer for trade stations refresh. PS there's a massive performance drop when you get the floating message that you're out of cargo space and just popped a station wreckage.

Trading. Or rather, gathering resources from salvage scrapyard/station wreckages then hunting down places to sell them and in the process making more trades (usually far more profitable). On a custom server, my current ship is one large cargo block, with framework wrapped around and thrusters and other "internals" on top. No shields because I don't do combat.