ShipBasher Development Log 1: So Far

Way back when I was in game development school I had an assignment for which I built a clunky prototype of a game I, for lack of a better name, dubbed "StarBlast!" (no affiliation with the later and much more successful starblast.io). The basic concept was a sandbox in which players could open up a "Ship Builder" minigame, construct a space warship out of a variety of predefined sections, and then switch to either a "Scenario Editor" or the game's Campaign or Sandbox modes to spawn a bunch of warships either of their own design or pre-built and pit them in battle against each other. I even made a cute little trailer for it even though I never made a proper public release, let alone tried to sell the thing:

One of my pet projects, as I've given a cursory mention previously, on which I've worked off and on in the years since then is to rebuild this game with entirely my own assets, more robust code, a more polished general design, and lots of user customizability and mod support.
Here's what I have so far:

It's rather barebones at this point, but it counts as progress nonetheless. I've also mocked up a ship editor complete with the ability to spawn some cubes and move them around (whoa!) and with some pretty buttons to click that don't do anything useful.
There isn't much else to say at this point aside from expounding on the details of the design of the game, but nobody wants to hear about my Totally Original Idea™ with no implementation in sight, so instead I mean to reveal the workings of the game piecemeal over the course of its development logs.
My current hurdle is figuring out what sort of system to use to save and load ships, and eventually other data - XML? Unity's built-in JsonUtility? A third-party JSON library? My own homebrewed lexer and parser? Hmmmmmmm... Expect the next update to involve my answer to this puzzle.