Upgrading my ships

I'm pretty newb (bought the game on 420, which I'm proud of because I usually pirate my software. I've getting into my first real game, set on normal, as Terran, going military "right makes right" type direction.

It's going pretty well, I'm at war with my biggest neighbor in a large galaxy, and I have the productive capacity to churn out custom made fighters and transports to destroy them.

The issue I'm bumping into though is this: as I research higher levels of missle technology, say Stinger, Stinger II and Stinger III, do I have to manually get into my ship design and add the new technology to my fighters? If so, is there a way to upgrade ALL of my fighters to the same version of a new design at one time? Or is that once I create a ship, thats what it is forever and I just have to be careful of creating a whole fleet of Ship X if I know I'm going to be getting some new weapons/defenses and redesigning it soon into Ship Y?

Thanks in advance for the great replies.

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You can upgarde ships. Any ship of a certain hull size can be upgraded (or downgraded) to any other ship currently possible to build. Small ships can be upgraded to any other small ships. However, you need to design the ships, there is no automatic upgrade. Go to the shipyard, click on the ship you wish to upgrade, press "upgrade", remove obsolete components and add the newer ones of your pleasure, and save the ship under a new name. Then, in the game, double click on the ship you wish to upgrade, and click "upgrade". You are presented with a list of ships it could possibly be changed into (based on hull size), and must pay to have the ships upgraded. You can pay a lot now and nothing later, or a little now and a lot more over time (paid on a per week basis). Also, you have the option of clicking a button that says "upgrade all ships of this class", which could cost a lot more if you have a lot of those ships you wish to upgrade. Also, bear in mind that if your ships are far from your territory, they will take longer to upgrade, and while they are upgrading, they have only 1 hitpoint and are very vulnerable to attack, so be careful about your ship locations when you upgrade.

Upgrading ships costs less I believe than making a whole new ship from scratch, but it can still be pretty expensive. If your ships have been through several battles and gained a lot of experience, however, upgrading your experienced ships is well worth it.

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By the way, you can't upgrade ALL types of fighters to a single type at once, just all fighters of a single class to another class.

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that helps a lot. thanks.

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