I'm messing around with a new style of making ships (non-kitbashed); its much faster than my old method, makes for not-greyscale ships XP, and I think it gives a relatively visually consistent look.
A couple examples: [Note, these aren't for re-use in other people's mods unless I explicitly give permission, edited, whole, or otherwise. Just saying this since the last time I posted whole sprites, someone kitbashed some of them really poorly without approval]
Here, I was doing some preliminary experimentation. I hadn't really figured out how I was doing this. Went back and touched it up after I made the frigate. Still needs some work I feel, might just redo it later.
Here, I had a better idea of the methodology I wanted to use, and manged to make a much clearer image, which I hope feels visually consistent (which is partly why I kitbashed so much)
The background of this faction is one I planned out ages ago. These are bleeding edge ships; all prototypes developed just prior to and following the collapse of the gate network by a secret Dominion R&D installation in the sector; specifically, they were tasked with designing heavily automated and fully autonomous ships. The installation was a fully self-contained habitat vessel landed in the arctic region of a terraformed but lightly inhabited agricultural world, which had a rather conspicuous autofactory in orbit, which tended to "go offline" much to the population's displeasure due to "unspecified technical difficulties". Despite this, the world would become very attractive later on due to having an autofactory (Despite its reputation), and an agricultural base. The research installation maintained their secrecy even once the gate stopped functioning; it wasn't until factions started forming, and multiple invasion fleets were sent their way that they revealed their presence... and the fleet of drone ships they had constructed. While nominally they were under the control of the Domian's military, it was the scientists who took charge of the operation, as they were the ones with the command codes (and backdoor over-rides...). When it became clear that the gates were probably not going to be coming back on line anytime soon, they organized into more of a coherent body of governance (in this case a meritocracy focused on intellect). They became the Directorate. They focused first on defense, second on maintaining their knowledge base, and third on acquiring as many blank blueprint roms as possible; while they had a large number on hand, the roms would not last forever, especially since it often took quite a few flawed prototypes before a production-grade design was produced. This stash ran out less 50 years in, and the creation of new ships and weapons has ground to a near-halt, with only a few roms trickling in over the years. On the other hand, there were other practical limits as to how quickly the Directorate could expand its fleet and territory; the autofactory required raw materials, and infernium was always hard to come by. A number of blueprints have trickled out of their hands over the years, all of which were incomplete or nearly-complete versions of less-critical weapons and ships. The rate at which the Green Sun pirates manage to accumulate them suggests that there are some pretty heavy dealings between them, likely in exchange for hunting for new roms and raiding hegemony supply convoys, however nothing truly conclusive has come up yet.
As to the stats of these ships, they are generally built with defense in mind; a lot of the initial designs were re-worked early on to be more defensible, since every ship lost meant that more raw materials would need to be maintained, and in the case of non-drone ships, that their already tiny population base would be further reduced. Superb shields, decent armor, but anemic slot counts and/or slot-size are all common attributes of Directorate ships. Many of them also incorporate defensive systems (well, for the next update anyways ;P) such as systems to foil missiles or targeting.