[c_of_red]

Prolly I am. I was looking for patches and ran across a bunch of stuff that was called mods and consisted of new sets of Icons for various ship types.
I have thought about it. What is the point of building something esthetic that will never be "seen" except by radar or infared? You install all the fear and awe you want, I'm going to blow stuff up and kill things.
As far as cost goes; Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam.
2 ships with the exact same performance and weapons, only yours is 'pretty', or scary ( to you, I doubt that your opponent gives a hoot. I KNOW the Computer doesn't), while mine is cheap and ugly. So your's cost 10K whatevers and mine costs 8K. So for 100K units, you get 10 and I get 12.
Like Uncle Joe said "Quanity has a quality of it's own"
Example; In WW2 the best US Figter was the P-51. What made it the best was that 14,819 were built in 4 1/2 years. The P-47 and F4U had better performance then the P-51, but they were more expensive to build (P-47) and took longer (F4U).
Technology changes, people don't. An engineer of 200 years in the future is going to look for the best solution, just like an engineer of today or 200 years ago.