Yes, you need to design your own ships. The default ships are pretty much useless.

If you don't care about how your ships look like, just double-click the components you want, they'll then be placed automatically, although at totally weird placed. Does not affect functionality though.

You're not alone. I played with lego myself.

Every so often, I get the energy to design a new ship for the game, sometimes building a new one to fill a specific role. My brother has commented in the past that I build good looking ships. Maybe I should post some images some time.

In Twilight of the Arnor, there's now an option for the AI to design ships for you, so if you have Twilight you may want to check that out and see how it works for you.

 

I liked the ship design in Orion 2, but not in GC2, because it's extremly clumsy implemented in GC2.
In Orion 2 the ship design had some common sense because the ship designer always took the most modern computer systems and armour and I only had to care about the important parts and select additional armour, weapons and special systems from a list.
In GC2 I have to place internal computer systems and hull armour types on certain positions on the hull which is total nonesense.
It would be much better to select internal systems and armour types from a list and define several weapon and engine slots for a certain ship hull and select the weapon and engine types then with a list, too. I don't need the option to design a million ultra ugly looking ships. Just give me the 10 good looking variants, that's all I need.

And in Lego the whole target is to design an object, but in GC2 the target is to administrate an empire, start war campaigns, etc. Ship design is only candy, and it's not funny to start a 20 min ship building project every time I've researched a new technology. I also hate the fact that I constantly have to turn, zoom and move a ship to reach a certain building slot.

Madmen, all of you. If I couldn't make cool looking ships, I would have played the game as much as I did!

(And, to avoid the obvious "...because you were wasting that time building ships" response, I don't consider time spent in the editor as game time)

I know it can be intimidating at first but it really is necessary to use the best current combination of weapons, defense and miniaturization tech that you have. Also it may be necessary to optimize your weapons choice and/or defense choice to effectively counter an opponents ships.

With that said once you get used to it designing ships can be fun. I don't mess with jewelry or struts and supports or such but I do like my ships to be symmetrical and to have the basics like engines in the rear facing backwards and weapons in the front facing forwards. Call me crazy but that's just the way I like it.

Yes in DL and DA you can just double click on the part and it will be automatically placed but all your ships end up looking like left handed lobsters. Not that there's anything wrong with that, actually there's a lot of comic relief seeing ships like that scoot all over the galaxy at a close zoom level.

Also as Cari mentions TA will design the ships for you which I assume will probably use the symmetry criteria and engines in the rear weapons in the front, defenses top and bottom. But that's just a guess on my part.

One thing I can say is even going with TA certainly use this feature, but at some point if you're bored take a moment to design your own ship. It's not hard, it doesn't take long and it can actually be fun.