Questions about scaling in the ship designer?

In GCII one of the more frustrating things was not having an absolute scale to design your ships against, more than once I ended up accidentally designing a huge hull that turned out being smaller than a large hull or something like that.

I kind of am having the same problem with the ship designer in III, it's really hard for me to get a sense of scale for the ships I'm building.  This is just sort of a general observation, but how does scaling work?  Is there an upper size limit for ships in terms of both physical size and number of parts? 

I read somewhere that the game automatically scales the ships in the game itself, so if you build a huge battleship but say accidentally start with a tiny hull cube, your battleship is getting scaled down to the size of a fighter when you build it in game.  Is that right?

Are there any plans to include a compass so you can tell how you're oriented or a "re-center" button that returns the ship to its default orientation?  As it is I get turned around really easily.  It would be nice to have a command to change the absolute magnification of the ship as a whole too instead of the individual parts.

I notice there is a glowing hex "scaler" that you can put down, does this indicate the absolute biggest a ship can be?  Not larger than this hex when it is centered on the initial cube?