These are obviously mod-oriented, and I'm not even a modder myself (not yet, anyway—I do have some free time coming up in November!). Just thought they might be of interest and wondered how easy it would be to implement them. Not a pressing concern by any means; I'm simply curious about what the engine can/could do.
1) Ship names drawn from two different lists. Rather than assigning a faction's ship names to, say, a single list of mythological figures, you'd assign names by combining a word from one list with a second from another, maybe with a preposition in between. So you might create melodramatic names with noun-preposition-noun structures involving weapons and such, e.g.
Blade of Heaven,
Sword of Wisdom,
Fist of the North Star (har har),
Pillar of Autumn (har), or more abstract ones with adjective-adjective structures from, say, a list of emotions and a list of colors:
Ardent Ochre,
Jealous Blue,
Uneasy Indigo.
Also entertaining (to me, and possibly nobody else) would be a naming scheme that drew two choices from one huge list and always alliterated: just a lot of random words that it'd stick together into names like
Trouble Tart and
Walter Wednesday.
2) Multiple graphics for a single ship. Obviously if all I wanted to do with this was create variants for different factions, it'd be easy enough to make a new file and have an "Astral-B" with a Hegemony paint job or whatever. The codex might get cluttered, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. However,
Psiyon's party ship (awesome, by the way) with its graffitied armor reminded me of the Indies from
Independence War, and I wondered whether it wouldn't be possible to implement a feature that allowed a faction like that in Starfarer.
Having ten different images for a single ship would be a terrible waste of resources, though, and it'd probably still get repetitive. Instead, might it be possible to create a set of decals, something like the damage graphics, that would be randomly applied to different parts of a ship's hull graphic? Perhaps broad changes, like big swathes of color, could go on the lowest layer, with smaller details—a smiley face here, some graffiti tags or rude messages there—on the next layer up and then the damage decals laid over all of it. Besides giving modders a cool feature to play with, it might be a good way to introduce a little variety to pirate (skull-and-crossbones decals!) and mercenary fleets in the vanilla game.
I've had a hard time finding actual screenshots of poor, forgotten old
I-War, but there's
some fan-art here that'll give you the idea, more or less. It wouldn't need to be so big and dramatic in Starfarer, of course.