umm i have some ideas...for trade routes since the idea of trades routes is to make money how about using the phase lane texture to designate trade lines between planets and any freighters(tradeships) and refinery ships that use those routes gain 25% more cash/ore and cystal. And perhaps for the trade/refinery stations we could have completely neutral ships hyper in (this idea is seen in star trek armada) dock with the station u gain money and they hyper out to another planet. Would make the mod a little more realistic from an economic perspective since not every1 wants to fight but all want to make money

That sounds pretty good it doses need that

I had a solid idea for the ships and tried to implement it. First I used the Alliance Gallofree ships as Trade ships, with a few adjustments and weapons stripping. That worked. I also tried to make the Alliance Bulk Cruisers as Refinery ships, but it would minidump as soon as I tried to start the game. I had to re-install the mod after that.

That seems like a good idea to me. If you want to help implement that, let Eville know. We are definitely looking for people with Sins moding experience.

I plan on replacing the trade ships, but we can't really change any of the actual coding for the behavior unfortunately.

Can we get construction tugs to do the building?

Wow, the stuff I know about modding is very minimal. I will try different things and tell you how how/if they work. It worked with the Gallofree/trade ship I threw together. I used the Gallo file and Techtrade file in gameinfo, did some cut and paste, removed weapons and changed it's designation and a few other things. All I did was build off of your genius. I will also test the limits as to what it can handle.