Haven't touched this yet (will give it a shot in a few days), looks pretty interesting. Wanted to know if ships just gain more OP as you level, or do the ships get larger as well with additional/bigger hard-points?
The hard-points are pre-determined. However, as you start out there won't be enough OP on the ship to optimize it, or even equip all weapon slots. For example, the Foxhound only has 25 OP while the regular Hound has 30, eventhough the Foxhound has 3 more hard-points. The ships are designed so that as you get more personal skill points, the ships can be more and more optimised. Eventually they get better and more powerful than the regular versions of these ships (Hound, Vigilance, Lasher, etc.).
Since Uomoz is working on "ship upgrade" code, I may add a second upgrade to the mods, which is sold in the campaign for a ton of credits.
So I'm assuming you'll be replacing the vanilla starters, aside from faction specific starters with these creations?
Will they hold the same specials, or will the specials be considered upgrades too?
I.e Phase skimmer on wolf frigate, turns into phase cloak?
Each ship is a separate download, like a mini-mod. Each of these mini-mods contain a starting ship and a mission where you can test it against the regular version of the ship. You can not run all the ship mods at the same time. You'll have to choose the starting ship you want to pick for the campaign. You pick it by choosing the "Did something else" career choice. However, when I've completed a whole series of starting ships, I might just merge them into one bigger mod, so they all show up when you pick the "Did something else" career choice.
Specials will be changed. Like banehunter pointed out, the Foxhound has a drone-bay, instead of a flarelauncher. The Sentinel has a forward facing flarelauncher (very handy against incoming missiles during a head-on dogfight) instead of fast missile racks.