ICE was my favorite mod back in the day too, and I've been working on some code reorg on and off for a while in preparation to build the mod into a usable state in 0.8.1a. Life's been busy and I doubt I'll be done for another few months yet. If someone else wants to snipe it, be my guest. I've also yet to ask Sundog for permission, since I don't believe it's sufficiently complete to merit even considering release.
Some rambling: with the overall lowered combat lethality in 0.8, some significant balance issues with playing ICE in extended campaigns are less problematic, but there's still the fundamental issues:
1. balancing defense of phase-only factions in general, and
2. the weapon range "normalization" built-in hullmod combined with the weird ICE weapon ranges which make ICE/vanilla/other-faction interop weird and often unbalanced.
For the former: I've been tinkering a bit with a different system to change how ICE defense works to make damage taken follow a shallow log growth curve - basically, damage shaving that's increasingly effective against high single instances of damage. This is a way to address a frequent frustration (in my perception) with unshielded ships where you're much more vulnerable to instant death from e.g. Reapers or high-alpha strike weapons in situations where a shielded ship could just eat an extra-long overload, since shields are instant-toggle but phase ships are subject to the phase cooldown. There needs to be a downside too, which I haven't fleshed out yet - likely one of two things:
1. decreased armor damage reduction vs. low-damage attacks, e.g. a Hellbore hit will do reduced balance, but sustained Light Assault Gun fire will be more damaging than usual; or
2. damage reduction based on distance from your enemy, which may be impossible since iirc it's not yet possible to find how far a given projectile has traveled.
For the latter - I think it should just be removed, and weapons balanced appropriately so that they're not overwhelming when mounted on other ships but sufficiently useful on ICE ships. Achieving this could require some kind of penalty or bonus built-in to ICE ships, but the weapons themselves should be balanced to the vanilla baseline. The precise mechanics of the Falx beam are also a headache - it should probably stay a ICE-only builtin. Armor repair is a rabbit hole as well - maybe some sort of per-engagement cap, or have ICE armor breach earlier and "leak" hull damage at a higher rate so hull attrition can accumulate.
I'm not sure whether this will turn out to be a fun way to differentiate ICE or just a bad gimmick. I did really like how different the ICE playstyle was, despite the occasional balance problem, and I want to try to preserve that uniqueness while fixing some of the edge cases.