Appleworks has a decent combination of line weight (and texture and color) control, reasonably good grid controls, and page scaling.
I will generally start in the drawing tool with bringing up the visible rulers with a half-inch visible grid and a 1/8th inch snap-to setting. I set the deckplan grid, being 1.5m or 2m (Traveller edition dependent) on the half-inch visibles using a width-1 line set to a light blue dashed pattern.
From there I lay out the hull form of each deck to get the volume I want (I go lo-tech and count grid squares, typically), lay out the easy stuff like engines and the big constraining objects like cargo bays, then fill in the rest. I typically go in with an idea about where the bridge is going to be.
External hull lines and bulkheads are width-3, while internal non-bulkheads are width-1 or -2. Aside from the blue (or sometimes reddish) floor grid and things like fuel spaces, I don't go in for a lot of color, as I'm a fan of the old CT look for deckplans.
Hit the
icon at the top of this post and follow the starships link for examples.
Some Appleworks caveats:
-Put a big outline box around the whole drawing once you know what size it is. AW's GIF export will only go out to the outermost *defined* pixel of your drawing, which, if not boxed, will be the skin of the ship...
-Gradient fills don't export very well from AW to GIF or JPEG. You might have better luck "printing" directly to PDF.
My style isn't the only way possible, of course. I've seen some very nice work done in AW, but that sort of thing will take longer and may yield a less playable result. I'm aiming for "slap it on the table and start the shoot-out", not framed artwork.