The Manufactory can build several expensive airships, namely: the Big Gun Ship (an airship derived from the vanilla Airship), the AC Cargo Ship and the AC Field Ship.

The Manufactory exists to make producing these big expensive ships safer. Normally a unit under construction will be destroyed by any amount of damage, no matter how tiny. But units that are being constructed by the Manufactory, have their full health and will only be destroyed if they or their Manufactory reach 0 health.

Manufactories can only be build inside the void.

You can select the ships that are currently under construction, by clicking the center of the roof. Or click the ends/sides of the building to select the manufactory itself.

A manufactory has 2 production modes:

1. Manual start, where you have to approve each project before production on it can start. You can approve the next project, while another is already under construction.
2. Automatic start, where production on the next project starts automatically, once the current project has completed.

Other functions:

1. You can set the rally point for the ships produced by the manufactory, but you can still manually change the target of the ship that is being build (after selecting it through the roof).
2. You can abandon the progress on the current project at any time, to immediately change to another project, but you lose all spend resources.

The Big Gun Ship is basically a vanilla Airship, but with damage/energy brought more in line with other top tier units. Changes compared to the Airship:

1. The movement speed, range and attack rate upgrades from the portal apply to the Big Gun Ship.
2. With portal upgrades, the dps is the same (20% less damage per hit, but 25% more hits), but the damage/energy is more in line with other units. It is still the most efficient damage/energy weapon available: 145 damage/energy vs the 109 from ERN'ed Berthas (Airships do an absurd 1450 damage/energy).
3. Big Gun Ships are build in a manufactory, not as a building on a ground.
4. The cost + range + recharge of firing the sniper and missile launcher were brought in line with regular snipers and missile launchers. Which also means that ERN'ed snipers + missile launchers are better at their job than the Big Gun Ship is.
5. With all weapons enabled, the Big Gun Ship will burn through ammo like there's no tomorrow, especially once the portal upgrade is active. So consider turning off the sniper and missile launcher, so all ammo can be dedicated to what the ship is best at: shooting at creep with a very big gun.
6. The Big Gun Ship has collision detection, so no 2 (or a 100) ships can be in the same exact position. This nerf is somewhat offset by the range increase from the portal.
7. he energy grid connection of the Big Gun Ship is on an antenna below the ship, so that the ship has an easier time maintaining it's grid connection.

The AC Cargo Ship has 4 notable functions:

1. Collect : suck up anticreeper with a mini singularity. Once the AC is sufficiently high, it will start being pumped into the ammo cargohold. If the ship is not distributing AC, then the collect function will automatically turn off once max ammo is reached.
2. Distribute : share 10 AC/second to any connected units. With the portal mining upgrade this goes to 20 AC/second. To note: it shares AC, not bluite, so it will not fill up the factory.
3. Dumping : dump the cargo at great speed directly below the ship.
4. Singularity : this is the same as an orbital singularity, but only affecting AC and centered on the ship. For when you really want all nearby AC gathered in one spot.

The ship can move with active fields, but fields take time to have an effect on the liquid AC. So collecting might be entirely ineffective while moving (if the AC is too shallow) and a moving singularity is actually not all that spectacular. To allow the liquid AC to keep up better, the ship has a 40% speed debuff while the singularity is active.

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