any way to scale the base hull of a ship?

Not that I can think of (not in the way you want anyhow), since no matter how you scale it in the model itself or in the ship designer, the game would just autoscale it to the sizes specified in the code for the given hull class when it got to the map or combat viewer.

i don't suppose attaching a < sizemod > tag to the XML file for the hull would make any difference?

I've personally been wishing the scale slider could also apply to the hull before you add anything...

Large and huge hulls get way way too big, fleets of 3 tend to end up being complete jumbles...

None whatsoever, as sizemods have nothing at all to do with the visible size of the ship (rather they alter the capacity requirement of a component based on the hull's total capacity).

ahhh ok, well that's good to know. here's a good one tho, is there anyway to take a shipconfig file of a shipm with a standard base hull of some sort, and alter it in a text editor, and somehow replace the base hull with a blank hull from your hull mod, and make the hull that was being used a dummy object that can be scaled?

Sure, you can do that much.

Just change the beginning of the shipcfg file like so:

Replace:
BASE_HULL=S0_Medium0.x

With:
BASE_HULL=S0_Medium_Blank.x
Dummy01=S0_Medium0.x
Dummy01_Scale=0.250000
Dummy01_Yaw=0.000000
Dummy01_Pitch=0.000000
Dummy01_Roll=0.000000
Dummy01_Component=Medium0

Then prepend Dummy01| to all the remaining lines in the file.

ok, now the tough part is that there's already a dummy01 object in the file. In that case it it just as simple as adding 1 to all the dummy objects already in the file? I.E. replace the items you said, and change the origional dummy01 to dummy02, and the origional dummy02 to dummy03, etc...?

OR is that not even neccessary b/c the dummy number only refers to what hardpoint on that object the item is being attached to?

OR is that not even neccessary b/c the dummy number only refers to what hardpoint on that object the item is being attached to?

Right, the dummy is actually the name of the hardpoint in the model file, so you can have all the different Dummy01's you like. In fact most of the models have a Dummy01, since that's the default name for the first null point you add in 3dsm, IIRC

The shipfg is basically a tree, telling the root model (the hull), then what items are connected to its dummies. Then it lists what models are connected to the dummies on those models, and so on.

gotcha gotcha. i was able to do what we're talking about and it worked just fine. tho the config file had something like 800 lines i had to prepend, so thank god i wrote a simple c++ proggie to do that for me.

Now i only have one more issue, and i'm pretty sure i know your answer already. Is there any way to scale all the objects in the shipconfig file equally at the same time? By adjusting the size of the dummy main hull? Or any way at all besides changing all the scale values manually?

Not in the game, no, but it shouldn't be too difficult for you to write a script to process the file and multiply all the scale factors by X amount.

yea i figured that would be the only way. little more complicated than my little add dummy01 script, but i suppose it's the only way.

I thought maybe all the items would scale up if the base hull was scaled.