I'm more than a lot excited for Gal Civ 3, 2 is one of my favourite games of all time and the forum community was a huge part of that! One of the coolest thing's that the community did every year was post their absolute favourite ship designs from that past year for everyone to see and marvel over, showing off beautiful, cool, funky or just plain massive vessels used across their fleets and games - without any care for the actual combat stats of the things! This cross pollination of ideas would even occasionally result in their being quasi-fashionable pieces being in style each year as someone would demonstrate a cool new way to use a piece or pieces and others would follow and come up with even cooler uses for the same piece(the haylcolm drive and lambda shuttle-like piece come to mind). By the time rotating pieces came around we had ships that looked like works of art, bristling with fake weapons pods and our own made up statistics for the fictional weapons we were building and adding our own narratives to the things, seeing each others ship designs and building competitor ships based on what the others are doing! Fun times and fond memories those. 
Normally there's no actual awards for the best design, but this year as we only have one entry I feel we can do away with that, and as such it is my great pleasure to award the team behind the teaser trailer for Galactic Civilisations 3 the award for all around coolest ship design for 2013!
I'm incredibly excited to see what we can all come up with in the new ship designer next year, I have a feeling that we're going to be able to create some truly special things!
-Fate