One reason why the update is taking so long...
Meet the Carrum, the basic Imperial light freighter. It's lightly armed and rather fragile, not very fast or maneuverable, but carries a ton of cargo. All it gets for a system is 2x6 basic flares. Until...
The first of three packages, this one costs 5/10/18/30 OP and significantly bumps up the ship's non-shield durability. It's roughly at about the level of Heavy Armor, plus about half of Armored Weapon Mounts and Insulated Engine Assembly, combined. Oh, and it modifies the ship system with some kind of defense- or durability-related benefit. If this sounds overpowered, that's because it is. The Imperial Packages are generally intended to be better than equivalent vanilla hullmods, so that you pick them over the vanilla equivalents.
The catch: Imperium hulls are re-balanced to have relatively mediocre base stats and a relatively large amount of OP. Without one of these packages, an Imperial ship is flexible and can be built out to be generally decent or min-maxed for a specific role, much like many vanilla ships. Add in one of those unique packages, however, and you essentially trade the extra OP for exceptional stats in a specific area. It almost becomes a new ship... not one that's unilaterally
better, but one that's certainly
different. As a result, each Imperial ship can fill a variety of roles, but each one tends to be specialized for a specific task.
You might recognize this one, because it's very similar to one of the old hullmods. This one is also 5/10/18/30 OP, obviously improving range and accuracy. If stacked with ITU, this can make for some intense long-range siege action. Alternatively, the flat bonus disproportionately improves short-ranged weapons like Pulsars, enabling a different - and more potent - set of weapons in a general-use context. Much like the Armor Package's maneuverability penalty (which becomes especially nasty if you add Heavy Armor), it isn't always helpful; the projectile speed and turret traversal penalties are quite noticeable and make the ship particularly vulnerable to fighters.
The Targeting Package tends to impart system mods that improve weapons in general, or have some kind of synergy with the play styles associated with the hullmod.
This last one is 10/20/30/60 OP, so quite a bit more expensive than the others. It was a lot of fun tuning the benefits for this package, especially the directional speed boost. You'd think that ships with the Elite Package need to be berserkers like the Safety Overrides hullmod tends to produce, but the reality is more nuanced. While you can make balls-to-the-wall rushdown builds with this, it's also possible to treat it as an enabler for high-cost weapons like the Heavy Pulse Laser.
Elite system mods are particularly dramatic and usually make the ship better at being aggressive.