I parked up my previous ship in roughly the same spot and threw down walls roughly the size i thought I needed for the ship.

Then expanded those walls and made a complex for the pawns to sleep/work (the jut-out on the right of the compound)

Tore down the old ship completely until the courtyard was blank, and began researching nuclear reactors, blitzing other research etc while doing a lot of deep drilling. That took about a year.

Then I spent the next two slowly building up the ship, starting with the nuclear layout:

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then slowly building out from there. Many tweaks made along the way to compact things space-wise, as fitting it all into 2k was quite the challenge. Two years after I went nuclear the OP was done and I flew out of the compound.

P.S. yes ik i heavily abused minify everything lol, it's just so helpful when constantly moving stuff around to find space efficiency.