in my opinion the easiest way of adding hardpoints is using the tool hardcmp after you exported the model as cmp file. Give it a try

Hi DragonRider, and welcome to the starport!

Have a look here, that should cover your hardpoint related questions. If not, feel free to ask!
Need Help with First Time Editing: Ships and Weapons

About new ships: Are you more interested in the modeling side, or in the coding part of it? Maybe this helps:
drizzt4.0 ship creating tutorialv1.5 This tutorial already is a bit older, and by now there might be some better alternatives to the tools used. I am pretty sure there are newer exporters available, and instead of fl_ids you might want to try other tools like flDev. On top of that I suggest you don't edit the files directly in your Freelancer installation folder though, but make use of the mod manager tool instead.

Hi cronty, and welcome to the starport!

To question 1:
You are right, ships are defined in shiparch.ini
The Humpback's internal name is rh_freighter
Changing hitpoints is pretty easy, just change "hit_pts = 5800" to whatever number you like. Parts of your ship that can be shot off (e.g. wings) have their own hitpoints though, which are defined in the [CollisionGroup] entries directly below the [ship] code in shiparch.ini. Damage done to these parts is rerouted to the main hull though, so if I only shoot your wing and it blows off at some time, your ship still takes the damage.
Which type of equipment can be mounted onto which hardpoint is defined by the code below, example taken from the Humpback too:


As you see the format is hp_type = <thing you want to mount>, <name of hp>, <name of another hp>, ...
Notice that the same hardpoint name appears in multiple lines, which allows not only to mount level 7 weapons on HpWeapon01, but also the lower classes.
Let's say you add the following:

This would allow you to mount disruptors on both weapon hardpoints, and even torpedoes on the second one. If you don't delete the other lines of code regarding HpWeapon01 and 02, it would still be possible to mount the weapons on these hardpoints. If you delete the hp_gun_special_1 line, you could still mount weapons of levels 2-7, but not of level 1.
Same applies for the shields, turrets etc.
Note that there is no restriction on the the hardpoint names, you could even allow mounting mines on the weapon hardpoints and the like. On the other hand, whether or how much a hardpoint can rotate is part of the hardpoint's definition in the model file.
Another note: Changes done here will not be reflected in the ship descriptions in the game. These texts have to be edited manually, but thats a topic for some other time. Hint: code like ids_name = 237051, ids_info = 66598, these reference to texts stored in dll files.

Power source related values are not part of the ship, but of a special equipment. To understand this, we have to go a bit deeper into the "goods", and that is what all these ..._goods.ini files are for. For every part of equipment, ship, trade good that can be seen in your inventory or at a trader there is an entry in one of the goods files. For our needs, have a look into Goods.ini. There you should be able to find something like:

But as ships in freelancer are not sold completely empty, but usually come with an engine, power source, some lights, a tractor beam, a shield and stuff, there is something called packages. If you scroll further down in the Goods.ini file, you should find

Se here we have our ship hull, and onto it we mount a lot of different equipment. Have you ever seen lights and engines mounted onto your ship? No? Thats because they have no goods entry for them, and you also don't have any hardpoints defined that appear in the interface mounting lights and stuff!

But we can see we have a power source mounted which is called rh_freighter_power01. Let's see if we can find a piece of equipment with this name. Have a look into misc_equip.ini. You should be able to find the right values.

The level needed to buy a ship is part of the defenition what you can buy on which station. In market_ships.ini there is one code block for every station that has a ship dealer. Look for all the lines which include your ship package name, and change the value directly behind the package. Be careful though, every station has every ship listed, but the 0's and 1's at the end define whether the ship is available or not. Also not that every single station can only sell a maximum of three ships.


About using your modified files:
You don't have to encrypt the files again, Freelancer can read both.
The simplest way would be to directly replace the files in your freelancer directory, but I don't recommend this as it might be difficult to keep track of your changes and, with more complex changes, give you problems with different savegames.

Much better would be to get the Freelancer Mod Manager, create a new subfolder in it's mods folder with any name you like and put in all the files you changed, keeping the original folder structure of the game. Using the mod manager, you can easily activate and deactivade different mods, and it even keeps the savegames separated. If you want to use your old save with the mod, simply copy it after activation.


About savegame compability:
As long as you only edit or add things like equipment, using old save games should be fine. Deleting things might be a problem (e.g. you have a weapon mounted, but it's code doesn't exist anymore). Changing faction relations requires a new game, as these relations are saved in the save file. The save file "restart.fl" also has to be deleted in this case for the changes to take effect.


About Question 2:
This should be as simple as adding the turret to an trader via market_misc.ini. You have to find out the nickname of this turret though - a search through weapon_equip.ini for nomad should give you several turrets.
All weapons in the game, so even station turrets and the like, should already have an [good] entry somewhere, and they should mount onto any weapon or turret slot. Might look a bit silly though, with turrets bigger than your fighter... All equipments info texts about its stats are auto-generated, but they probably have no descriptional text.


Edit: About viewing models and their hardpoints: Try out HardCMP! It allows you to add new ones as well.

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.