getting private sector ships to auto-design

[Ductape]

I am having trouble getting the private sector to auto design their ships. I have the ship design setting on manual, but in the empire policy settings, the private sector ships are set to automatic. on the design screen itself the ships are set to automatically upgrade and such. They have the money, they have an income of 400k, maintinence of 20k, and taxes of 140k

The issue is that the ships havnt re designed to include hyperdrive despite me having more mining systems outside my home system than in. They have the money, they have an income of 400k, maintinence of 20k, and taxes of 140k. so I'm stumped as to why they wont upgrade

[Ductape]

do I have to set the ship design setting to fully automated for it to work?

[FG]

With manual design you need to press F8, switch "Show all design types" to "Show private ships". Then select every type of the ships and press "Auto update selected design" (with this previos ship design become marked as obsolete). Then double check every updated design for hyper drives and additional components.

[Dr Duh]

none of the design automation works unless you have the main toggle on, but with it on, you can manually take over design updating/retrofitting of specific models.

All "auto update" button does with a design is replace all components with the same number of a newer component if it thinks it is better, like seeker missles -> concussion missles, etc. It won't add or remove things. There are a few things it doesn't do well - it will revert racials back to mainline if mainline is further researched, even if stats are still not as good, and it will force all your reactors onto one design if you wanted all military on hydrogen, all civ on casion. It's easy to revert though, so go ahead and try it out if you know you have some components to update, just check the results carefully and if it made more of a mess than you want to fix, you can always delete the design and go manually update from the previous design.

BTW, even on full manual, the AI still handles private ship retrofits no matter what.