It's true, you can't smite your enemies without ships. To build ships in Rank: WarMaster, you'll need some factories, and to access your factories, you'll need the factory screen.
The factory screen will let you select factories by planet and installation and build ships by simply dragging and dropping a ship design into your queue. You'll be able to view the specs of any of the ships you've designed, as well as jump directly to the Ship Builder to modify them. You'll be able to reorder your queues just by clicking and dragging …