Better Parts
If you play under the difficulty level of "advanced", you will have a wider 
selection of parts for each vessel you decide to use. For instance, the Defiant 
class ship's original defense mechanisms only included a navigational deflector 
and shields. With an advanced playing level, you are also granted the use of 
ablative armor and a cloaking device. Also, when you pick your class of ship, 
the hull mainframes will be empty. This gives you room for modifications. 

Big Bucks in Seconds
Go to any of the difficulty levels,and then go to the "Fleet" screen, and 
select a fully loaded ship(must have 2 torpedo launchers and all types of 
probes, best to use a Galaxy, Intrepid or Excelsior class ship). Go to the 
select mission window and select the mission "Test Launch a Probe and Collect 
Data" Once in the simulator select, from the control bar to the right of the 
screen, Accelerate. It will take around 10-15 seconds to complete the mission 

Extra Buying Credits
First you need to create a ship using as many credits that you can, the more 
you use the easier this trick will be. After your ship is built use the "Export 
Ship" function under the Fleet Heading. Once you have done this, go to the Main 
screen and enter a new "Admiral" name. Then use this new name and go to the 
fleet screen once again. Once there, use the "Import Ship" function to import 
the ship you created. Once it is in this new fleet, decommission it and the 
value of the ship will be credited to your buying funds. Keep Importing and 
decommissioning the ship that you created and your buying funds can go through 
the roof. I stopped at 1 Million credits. 

Get Ships Without Paying for Them
To get ships without paying for them do the following. Create a new admiral and 
then start constructio on a ship, it doesn't matter if you run out of money. 
When you have completed it (or run out of money), go to the fleet screen and 
export the ship. Now, go to the options menu and delete the admiral you just 
used. Create a DIFFERENT admiral and go to the fleet screen of this admiral. 
Import your ship and bingo, you've got your ship without paying for it (or if 
you ran out of money, continue building it and then repeat the procedure 
remembering to use a different admiral every time) 

Lots of Money
Open the program and create an Admiral. Check the amount of money you have. 
Close program and open Wordpad. Open the file C:\Program Files\Starship 
Creator\Shipmain\Usrs\Usr1.cst. If you have more than one Admiral, increase the
Usr1 to Usr2, etc. Do a search on the amount of money you have. Replace it with 
all 9's. Do not enter more 9's than the number of digits already there. Save 
the file. Run the program and you should have the new amount of money for your 
Admiral.