So titans,new capital ship, and other add ons are not good enough for you?

... So you want capital ships to have names and faces?

Give the new guy a break. He's probably thinking along the lines of heroes you often see in games with campaigns. I've seen them pulled off quite well in Conquest: Frontier Wars.

To answer your question, I doubt you'll see that in the expansion. The story doesn't have a campaign so has no real means of establishing individual backstories. The races is all it really touches on. The idea isn't bad if you want to propose it to a mod group or if you know how to do any modding yourself. Distant Stars gets close by having an Admiral's Shuttle that, when you get the resources, can produce a unique flagship. That's about it and the AI has trouble using it.

So hop around the ofrum and find mod threads. Someone might pick up the idea.

It's part of the flagship mini-mod for DS.

I like Prophi's idea, maybe not for Rebellion but maybe for a Mod or Expansion. What Im thinking is your first Capital ship would be your Hero/Ship named for your Player and you earn XP faster and have more abilites than the normal ship and if that ship dies you lose. 

Maybe like your hero in Warlords Battlecry series

Simple Idea: You select your first Capital ship and that's your Hero Ship beef up the stats and double the XP gain.

Advanced: Make more abilities available for the Hero Ship and make a completely different hull for it.

IF you proceed to modding and need a simple and easy to implement way to place names on ship models, simply make "name tag" meshes with textures that can be applied as particle effects onto a simple box face "name tag" and then attach them to multiple entity files using the same models.  It has limitations and it's a workaround but it will let you have a few special ships without adding tons of new large textures and meshes.

Well, I'm speaking from a Trinity POV here, but let's roll with it. If you wanted the Hero Ship idea, you could take the core idea behind DS Flagships and change it up so that there are more than one abilities, each being a different Flagship design that fits a different role. You would be limited to one at a time since the Admiral's Shuttle disappears when it casts the ability and doesn't respawn until the flagship dies. Again, the AI is resistant to using it.

Rehash: Go back a step to when the Flagship was there from the start. Whether it be a boosted variant of your first, free cap or a free spawn from the Admiral's Shuttle, you could achieve the result of a chosen path for this powerhouse and maybe the AI is more likely to use it. Hmm... might have to bug Ryat about this one.