A few quick 'Gold' questions...

[Suicide Junkie]

It sounds like you are trying to rebuild your mod from the patched files. Once you've gone beyond about 10 changed components, it is easier to tweak the existing mod, rather than to remod the patched files.

In order to update for Gold, you need to:
- add two lines to settings.txt.
- search-replace in components.txt the allowed vehicle, and can target lists. (about 6 changes)
- insert the seconday image line into all entries of vehiclesize.txt (may be easier to remod this one file, depending on how much you've changed)
- maybe a few other things I can't recall.

I can write a program to do all the above things automatically, which should get your mod running under Gold.
After that, you'd just need to copy the drone bits from Gold.