Wow, that looks great!
I really hope you manage to make a working starsphere of it.

Have you tried to put your texture on one of the spherical vanilla backgrounds?
That was the only thing that worked for me when I was investigating on this topic some time ago. Although my textures always were meant to tile up/down and left/right...
I never hat any luck exporting one myself, too.

That is right. And when such a part is destroyed, all equipment mounted on hardpoints attached to this part is lost, too. These parts are definded in shiparch.ini as [Collision Group] entries under the ship itself.

MISSIONS\LootProps.ini might help.

Ok, I will explain a litttle bit.
As ColdFire said, an entry for a base starts with a [base] block. There the nickname, faction it belongs to and how npcs call it are defined.

After that is a [MVendor] block, which defines how many jobs there are on the board (only for SP).

Then there are some [BaseFaction] blocks, one for every faction present on that base, it controls wether the given faction gives missions, which npc (defined below in a multitude of [GF_NPC] blocks) belong to them and their weight relative to the others theyhave on that base.

The [GF_NPC] contain the info for the individual npcs (body parts, voice, name, rumors they tell, if you can bribe them sometimes, wether they know some wrecks and bases they can sell the info of and so on. The Vendors are also defined, but usually don't have any voice and rumors and so on.

There is one [MRoom] block for every room you can enter on that base, traders and the baarkeeper have to be set as fixtures here to be always there, not only sometimes like the other npcs.

And then follows the next base starting with the [base] block and so on.

Welcome, smuggler.

Well, there are servers that have a dynamic economy system running, e.g. the Hamburg City Server, but for single player this is immpossible exept for random prices as far as I know. Note that fpr joining such a server you might need the mod this server runs.

Hi and welcome to the Starport!

About your model: I tried to open it with HardCMP, which gave me an empty model, and importing into Milkshape crashed the importer. So probably there's also a problem with that .zip file you uploaded.

He means that only the other palyers see the hit effects of projectiles.
I think 88flak had a workaround by adding an explosion block with the projectiles hit effect, but without any damage to wvery normal weapon.