Well, with having a fair idea of how much is needed to add just a single ship to the game, there's a number of simple mistakes that could have been made as well.  Most of which tend to be little more then typos or minor oversights (like did you remember to adjust the count values where applicable in the files you altered?  Update your manifest files properly?).   Most of these simple mistakes should be caught by the dev.exe as well, though, so it really IS your best friend, like grunt said above.  Although it's unfortunately no guarantee that it won't still CTD with a minidump and no warning (how I wish we could just open the minidumps when that happens.) And yeah, definitely use the most current reference files, if you didn't just create your own the same way the ones in that link were (ie: harpo's textbinner tool).

If the dev.exe doesn't help, I'm pretty sure we'll help you figure out what went wrong, all the same.

I think I've figured it out actually, but I'll surely call upon your skills should it be needed later on. Turns out I've mixed and matched different files [vanilla sins/entrenchment entity files] without even realizing it... probably the product of my horrible organizational skills. [For serious, I've got files all over the place and I haven't even a clue what's what half the time... it's like my desk... a nightmare to keep organized on the best of days!]

Thanks for the suggestions with the dev exe, gunmaster1, it's been very helpful! methinks the biggest issue is the string file...

In thanks, I'll show you some shots of the ships in-game [though only half-working.... and the Valkyrie's textures aren't done by far.]

Whoa thanks, ZombieRus! That's an amazing tool, it's really something!