I don’t see a problem, you should be customizing your ships before you build the first one lol 

Actually, I see the problems with this.

First, no default ship should ever be without an engine to begin with; there's just no sensible reason to build a ship turn one that can't move.

Second, it's just inconsistent.  Every ship design I've ever seen has an engine by dedault.  Why doesn't this one?

Third, I don't see why we start the game with such half-full ship designs in the first place.  Having to ALWAYS redesign your ships at the start of every game is just choresome.  Not rebuilding them is always bad and rebuilding them is always good, so why do we have half-built ship designs at all?  A decision point that's a foregone conclusion but always requires manual input to fix doesn't add to strategy; it just adds to the tedium.  Wouldn't a better suite of starting designs speed up game times considerably?

Here's a thought I know has been tossed around on the forums: let us pre-design some ships and save them to our profile before a game even starts.  We have whole custom FACTIONS available; why not let us save our favorite ship designs to our factions so we don't have to waste everyone's time designing them AFTER the game starts?  The code exists; all we need is UI frontend and file locations for the saved data.  This way, you could decide for yourself what starting ship designs are your preference and build them ONCE, rather than every time you start the game.

Pre-designing ships wouldn't work since the modules available change every game, and the circumstances surrounding that current game affects what modules you may place on a ship. I have hundreds of hours logged onto ES2 and I've never needed more than a min or two to design and/or update my ship. And I almost always check the ship in the ship designer before I build the very first one in order to make sure it has the right modules for the current situations. It's not chore-some to redesign your ships, and, I might sound a bit blunt, but it sounds a tad lazy that anyone wouldn't want to update their ships simply b/c it takes time. 

Also, ships can still move w/o engines. They just don't go very far. 

And this one could very well be a bug but I've encountered it in my games and it's not a big deal to take 10 seconds to add an engine... 

Daynen wrote:

First, no default ship should ever be without an engine to begin with; there's just no sensible reason to build a ship turn one that can't move.

Ships can still move without engine modules.

This will be fixed in an upcoming update, thanks for the heads-up.

An engine has been added to one of the empty support slots.

I love the idea of saving design BPs. That would save a decent amount of time (for me) in game.

Adressing Suis3ei's point:
Many of the unique modules in games are often just variants of existant versions, if a game were to happen where one of your BPs would be using a non-existant module, that slot would just empty or revert back to the basic (non-unique) variant of the module.