Probably answered this already, but what did you use to make the picture? (if you say ms paint i'm going to feel like an idiot for how obvious that answer would be)
But yeah, good ship (I think) I really have no idea since I've never made anything bigger than 30kt since I like to play conventional start and have a problem starting new games too often.
However, disregarding the very (very) large missile armament, how does a ship of this speed manage in attempting to use its beam weapons? normally nprs will just outrun me or have like 50 lasers on one ship and just take my fleets apart one at a time.
I used GIMP (
https://www.gimp.org/) to put it together. Though if you haven't used GIMP in the past I'd say Nuclearslurpee's suggestion of paint.net is likely to be a lot more user friendly and may have the same necessary functionality.
As for how, I do the outline on a transparent layer as the first step. There's a lot of pixelart around that can be used for inspiration. I in particular cribbed the Gauss turrets from fan pixelart from the reimagined Battlestar Galactic and then heavily modified them to fit the aesthetic a bit better and go from dual to quad mountings. I've also been building up a couple of image files with my own outlines for weapons and subsystems and once you have it you can quite easily copy and paste things to rapidly add stuff with minimal tweaking.
Once the outline is done I fill it with a neutral gray, add in light and shadows, and then finally colour everything in. I learnt how to do it using this tutorial:
https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=6360.0 which is excellent.
And yeah, in actual gameplay the ship needs much, much, bigger engines in order to function as a mixed role ship.
She is a beauty.
Thank you!