The ship designs are very central. You improve your ships with new gear, weapons and subsystems, but you also shape them to make sure they’ve got armour in the right places, that the guns have good firing arcs, and that they have important critical systems for what you need the ship to be able to do.

But it’s also important to make new ships when you need them. You’ll identify your needs and try to create a new ship that can fill that need.

The basis for your economy is mining and/or trade. You’ll need atleast one ship that can make you proper money, or mine the materials you need. So the focus is on multiple fronts. You don’t need to fight much if you don’t want to, but you will need to do some kind of business. That’ll probably be both mining and trading.

The most lovely thing about the game is that you can both control your ships in person, and control them on a strategic level. So if you get a (or a bunch of) mining ships, you can make sure they do their job while you’re off hunting pirates in your combat ship.

The focus is really where you want it to be. You decide! :)

edit: and to answer the question more succinctly; you can make money from combat missions and use that to buy whatever materials or other thing you need, but it’s probably hard to avoid mining completely.

If you care about Ukraine, you should start taking this more seriously. Outside of your echo-chamber, Russia has proved resilient to sanctions and their ability to manifacture vital military goods in some crucial areas outpace the west, and by far outpace what is avaliable to Ukraine.

The much hoped for ukrainian counteroffensive yeilded nothing, and instead Russia is slowly gaining ground, allthewhile expanding its army with new, fresh units and learning to work with or around their shortcomings. Ukraine doesn’t have anything to put its hope to other than simple endurance. And that’s something that Russia has always had a lot of. The outlook is grim.

Ukraine needs support