You don't have to remove whole ships from the mod's files to remove them from the game. All you have to do is prevent factions from using them - that stops them spawning in fleets or markets for the most part. It's not perfect, especially not if the mod has custom scripted spawning of ships anywhere, but it gets the ships you don't want to a low enough level you'll probably never see them, if it doesn't remove them entirely.
Ships show up in faction fleets/markets as per
tags. These tags are specified in two places:
ship_data.csv and the list of
.faction files.
NOTE: Before editing any files, duplicate them somewhere as backups!Let's start with ship_data. The ship_data.csv file is a spreadsheet-form file that lists the stats and some information for every individual ship (that isn't just a skin) with each ship "entry" occupying a column in the spreadsheet. Navigate within SWP's folders to:
data > hulls > ship_data.csv
and open that CSV file in a spreadsheet editor - Excel or LibreOffice is recommended. Scroll sideways until you find the "tags" column, which contains blueprint ("_bp") tags that tells ships what blueprint packages they're connected to, if any. The simplest course of action is to remove those tags from the entries of the ships you don't want to see. Save the file, making sure to save it in CSV format.
Removing blueprint tags from ships prevents those ships from appearing as part of vanilla blueprint packages (lowtech_bp, midline_bp, hightech_bp, etc.), which are connected universally to most factions - which means factions grab any ship with that blueprint tag. However, some ships have a tag "rare_bp", which means they have to be manually specified on a ship-by-ship, faction-by-faction basis. Navigate to:
then go through each FACTION.faction file, opening them up in Notepad++ or your preferred plain text editor. In each file you should look for the "knownShips" section, find the references to specific ships you don't want, and delete those lines, saving each faction file as you go.
If all goes to plan, you should no longer have the undesired ships spawning in fleets or markets in the campaign game. Theoretically you can do this to an existing save, and ships will just take time to "fade out of commission", but I wouldn't recommend it as I'm not sure what other connotations could exist. If all doesn't go to plan, well... That's why you make backups before editing anything.