Personally I would stick too the cloaks being as they are, as in if they had cloak before leave them be for lore reasons this makes sense.

As for turrets this should be fairly easy from what I can see here, not so much for adding new mounting points but increasing the mountable turrets (2/2) > (4>4) should be a quick edit.

I don't know if you increased the cost of the ships but if you haven't you should, and the base hull for the smaller ships would be advised to balance out the now overkill of fighters on carriers. It could stand to reason that the smaller craft could use a little boost hull wise and I was going change the ranks a little but will leave this up to your discrecion, I was simply going to allow frigate at freighters at a lower rank simply because on higher diff you get out numberd pretty darn fast and you just don't have the capital to build a fleet large enough too expand.

I would not worry too much about ship travel speeds equipment stock I whiped up a couple mods and published those tonight inspired by this mod to balance a few things out and generally just make travel a little less time consuming. Will have to sleep on it tonight for actual numbers but in hind sight the squishy craft could be made available sooner and a weapon overhaul might be needed if not a little tedious.

If I can find how to (if possible) to increase the income rates of the darn materials that would be a better option imo to give the player more to do base wise sooner, but thats outside the scope of this mod.

Increasing cost and hull is easy. I will likely end up doubling all of the hulls up to cruisers, and giving battleships and up a 1.5 modifier. Carriers will stay where they are hull wise, and I actually increased their price at the outset of Carriers: Reduxed as a slight balancer to justify their buffs.

I don't know if you noticed, but increasing mountable turrets does actually visibly add additional turrets to places on the ship. If you buy a little gunship instead of the one you spawn with, look zoomed in on the single turret that the ship comes with stock, go and upgrade it, and you will find that there are actually additional turrets visible on your ship.

Fighters for medium sized ships and freighters is a great idea! I am not sure frigates are large enough to justify a fighter slot, but we will see what works.

As far as the cloaks go, they used to have a ton of cloaks for all ships except carriers for 2/3 the shipbuilding nations in the game, but at some point, they removed cloaks from ALL of the ships. Now only the carriers that I modded (at the time it was lore friendly since I only gave cloaks to nations of which the battleships also had cloaks) have native cloaks.

As far as income rates of materials go... at one point I had the perk ID for that and it was part of the mod, but the first time they changed the perks on me, I forgot to copy the perk's bonusID down and now that particular effect is lost. Ergo, I know it exists, but since there are a few hundred perk bonusID's, I have no time to find out which one it is.

I see, modeling I can do if it comes too that.
Everything else you said looks sane enough, I will have hunt for the ID's.

Actually looking over the material for adding hardpoints this seems fairly straightforward http://www.moddb.com/games/starpoint-gemini-warlords/tutorials/finishing-up-your-new-ship

It appears you won't need to model anything afterall in-fact its really quite easy and it is all done inside the material editor. This means not only can we retro fit the exisint craft we could if we wanted too, duplicate the games fleet with MK2 MK3 varients with more turrets and more thrusters or different shiny effects quite fast.

Something I very well will be looking into as I love verients.
(did somebody say a freighterliner with an extra hardpoint and the ability to house two fighters)

I will try just messing with the hardpoints without touching the ship itself. If I come up with phantom turrets, I will take you up on that offer to do the modeling.

Hell, that is the kind of thing that could actually be a mod all its own. In that case, it would make more sense to publish it yourself than give the script to me.

More than anything else, I want this and all other mods I make to be (for lack of a more accurate term) lore friendly.

And yes, someone (you, actually :D) did suggest a freightliner with fighters and more hardpoints.
I was thinking of, instead of a replacer, making a copy of the files of a random freighter, giving it those additional hardpoints and fighters, and giving it a new name like "Insert-Freightliner-Model-Here Q-ship."

That was the route I was thinking aswell making non conflicting brand new ships using the existing models I could potentially load them up in Blender make some adjustments (adding visual model to any new hardpoint location) save the ship duplicate the exisitng one but using a new mesh this would allow a more diverse fleet since most of the spawning seems to come from databases it won't step on any mods toes and won't conflict much. New ships keynames don't conflict so it was just something worth looking into

Maybe not exactly in line with the purpose of this mod but, what the hell... I would really like if someone could make it so that your ships name actually showed up on the hull of the ship. The customization tools in warlords is a joke, lol.

But more to the point of this mod. I would like it to be more dangerous for a capital ship to travel alone. As it is now, a dreadnought or a carrier is like a swiss army knife; it can do everything. This may be way out of scope of what is possible to do within the frame of the core engine of the game but, think about it, wy do they call it a carrier group in the real world? Cos those big, lumbering hunks of metal needs protection from from faster, smaller, more agile ships. Just a thought.

That would be a spectacular mod. Putting the name on the hull is something I would love to do... might take some time considering that branches into digital art and that kind of thing is something I do not want to just mess with. If I do something like that, I want it in a way that actually looks like it blends with the natural colors of each ship.

On to the other part, the reason they have carrier groups in the real world is because while very powerful in open warfare, they have two major weaknesses. Anti-ship missiles and submarines. The idea is that the carrier group squares off the region where the CV is to prevent subs from sneaking by and providing an AA screen against ICBM's so that the carrier can do its thing by bombing the $#*& out of everything else with impunity.

In that way, carriers in the game are different from real life since they have actually effective on-ship weaponry and defenses. The balance against that is in real life there is, as far as the bounds of the skirmish are concerned, a CV has no limit on the range of its fighter craft while in game there is a very noticeable and hard limit on how close one must be for fighters to start attacking

The only way I could think of to do to accomplish making CV nervous about solo would be to greatly increase the "evasion" stat of gunships and corvettes. Basically to make the CV more vulnerable to being swarmed. However, I am not sure how to make it a NPC specific (but NOT faction specific) buff nor how to make the buff apply only when the player is flying dreadnought or carrier.

I wish they would add dedicated gun batteries for larger ships. Why is a battleship using the same tiny gun from a corvette just more of them?