You should double check that. When being launched, FL automatically creates a savegame if there is none. If you did changes to the modded content since that happened it still might be possible that such an incompatibility is the cause.

Ist bestenfalls mittels plugins machbar.

Oder wenn man dem Schiff generell eine hohe Kapazität gibt und diese dann aber durch "Volume" von vorinstallierten Equipment wieder wegrechnet.
zb. 400 Laderaum - ein Schild der 300 Laderaum verbraucht = 100.
Wird der Schild ersetzt durch einen der keinen Laderaum verbraucht hat man dadurch über Umwege eine Art Erweiterung des Laderaums erreicht.
Funktioniert allerdings nur bedingt da FL immer die 400 Max. Kapazität anzeigen wird für das Schiff. Wäre also nur eine Notlösung.

I guess the devs just took the liberty to make the naming schemes less boring this way while having an internal nickname that identifies the purpose of the faction.

you can not unless you fake the appearance using a custom nav object

I use it in my mod to call specific custom lod settings when I need them in certain situations. It only should have an effect on the stuff I have created and to my knowledge should not have any use for models that were not specifically created for it. That made me curious a bit.

There is a cascading load order.
That means that nebula, asteroids and encounterparameters always belong to the top of the file since the stuff loaded below requires these entries being in memory at the point of processing.

The order does not matter. Nebula can be above or below Asteroids... you can even mix it. The only important thing to remember is that zones and objects have to be below.

A batch of questions:

Are specular maps seperate?
In the vids you have posted over the the past months you have mostly shown metallic surfaces but also in 1 or 2 (IIRC) there were asteroids which looked like having a shiny surface. I am not entirely sure if that was intentional or just a side effect of the demo.
I think some surfaces better shouldn't be reflective.

How does this translate to interiors of bases?
FL renders them slightly different.

Are adv. texture settings such as detailmaps, glowmaps, animated textures etc still supported?