"That is until we hit the limits of the data files"
heh, that might take a while. I just did an experiment with components.txt; I QUADRUPLED it's size, and nothing bad happened. OK, SE4 was running a little slow, but other than that..
You can have 64k weapon families, 64k component families, a crapload of components, and I imagine the limits on the other files are similar. Now, implimenting that many new and *functional* ideas might be a bit difficult
Phoenix-D