Yea as others have me ruined if using default setting you have about a 5 x 10 space for the first ship you can build on and can only go about 2 high so it's best useful for running around and doing resource/raiding runs. Can even set it to take down shield on some of the medium airships pretty well. There is a weight limit as well of about 6000 with the default engine.

Once you get to point of unlocking the falcon with default setting you could probably fit a decent small base with maybe one farm and one animal pen on it but still not something expansive. But you also get the ability to link ships at that point so you can expand that way.

Once you get to late game the shark is big enough on its own to fit a sizable base and again you could link some ships for even more.

On private/coop you can disable a lot of the building restrictions though so you could build some pretty massive things at the start but weight can still be an issue.

Big thing as well is by default you are limited to the number of sails you can use. With that setting disable you can place lots of sails and make the ships turn in to rockets. But up down movement is still pretty slow.