The entities are copies of the original capitals with only the mesh use change and string change. The abilities can be attached to anything as long as there compatible game version wise. Once the ship is in game the ships entity can be modified to be anything you want.

You still have not mentioned the dev.exe which is a must for modding.

Thanks, rjhughes. Overwrote the old ones in my mod directory with the new one. But it still doesn't appear to change anything - I tried launching the game again and it's still doing the same thing. Brief black screen and then it drops me back to the desktop, with no warning or error message.

I'll plead guilty to being an extreme noob at modding, but it seems I'm still missing something for this to work... For clarity, I will list what I have done.

1. added the textures, gameinfo and mesh files to their appropriate directories in my mod (Distant Stars for Entrenchment 1.051)

2. edited english.str with the entries for Beta Kol and Marza, right below the entries for the normal ships, and increased the count by two

3. edited entity.manifest in the mod directory to include the Beta Kol and Marza, and increased the count by two

4. I added entries for the ships as well in playertech.entity. Could that be what's giving me trouble?

thanks rj for pointing out the -da alfa. 

High_Guard,

   I just re-checked the files and it works fine for me. Something you can also try is to take the "DS-Beta-AddOn" folder and put it in your Entrenchment 1.051 mod folder. Then stack it first with your Distant Stars mod 2nd and apply. You should see 7 capital ships that you can build. If that works then maybe we can figure out what you are doing wrong.

Move the whole folder into the mod directory. Don't merge any files. Then enable it 1st, then enable the DS mod and click apply. It should look something like this....