hmm,   perhaps a facility to HIDE hull types?  ie not remove them from the game but just not display  them.  In fact you could make this a generic thing for each racial profile. 

The problem would be identifying all the things that could legitimately be hidden, then setup a table for the program to know what items a particular race was able to see or not, then create an interface to handle changes (perhaps make hiding/unhiding an SM only function). NPRs would normally not have anything hidden, only player races.

I suspect tho that this would require major rewrites to existing interface code and will not really be pracitable even in the C# revisioning.

Yep.

C# Aurora will have an option to edit (not only add) hull types.

I know ship hulls can be added in Class Design, but is there currently a way to delete unwanted hulls? And when we add hulls, do we get to select the abbreviation the game uses?

If that's not currently possible, I wouldn't mind C# Aurora giving me such modding options.

It won't be moddable in the same sense as Skyrim or XCOM. It would be possible (probable) to have different background and text colours. Fonts are trickier because they aren't all the same length for the same text, which can screw up the UI (in he past I have worked on multi-lingual products and you run into a similar problem with layouts). For a commercial product, it would be possible (for example) to go through all the potential fonts and ensure the UI can cope with any of the variations. For a hobby project, it would use a lot of time that I could spend on more interesting areas.

Would it be possible to expose some of the files such as research files and maybe even the files that hold stats on different weapons, would love to be able to add in new weapons and tech?

I might have skimmed through relevant information in the various C# discussion threads, but for the life of me I can't find it now so I'm bumping this topic.
Will the interface, background, fonts, theme etc be easily (within limits) moddable?
I just came across the star trek LCARs screensaver and it reminded me that some people might like custom interfaces based on whatever empire theme they're running.

It won't be moddable in the same sense as Skyrim or XCOM. It would be possible (probable) to have different background and text colours. Fonts are trickier because they aren't all the same length for the same text, which can screw up the UI (in he past I have worked on multi-lingual products and you run into a similar problem with layouts). For a commercial product, it would be possible (for example) to go through all the potential fonts and ensure the UI can cope with any of the variations. For a hobby project, it would use a lot of time that I could spend on more interesting areas.

Hi question for @Steve Walmsley How moddable will this version of aurora be? Will i be able to go into some of the source code and add in my own feature and mechanics or things like that?