spiritplumber: you realize you're playing right into our hands...
after we release 1.0 in the next few weeks, we will fork the development and continue onto a wing commander universe fork which will have the whole universe--and all the ships from the appropriate timeframes (then hopefully eventually some code to detect where you are in the WC timeline)...anyhow that's not a reality yet...but it will be soon--and it looks like your patch will be the seed of such a reality
after we release 1.0 in the next few weeks, we will fork the development and continue onto a wing commander universe fork which will have the whole universe--and all the ships from the appropriate timeframes (then hopefully eventually some code to detect where you are in the WC timeline)...anyhow that's not a reality yet...but it will be soon--and it looks like your patch will be the seed of such a reality
what i am trying to do is to get VS star bases into privr but with the textures etc. in the right places.
i'm going to do so by retexturing ship models and mating pieces of ships together.