Any good Star Trek mods, or ship packs that anyone knows about? I'm wondering if I should try to get my local Star Trek club into Freelancer.

Nightstalkers Universe has got a very good Star Trek section in his mod, along with other themes. Well worth looking into.

Warped Edge SSM mod is also Star Trek themed with a good selection of ships.

There may well be other mods, but the above two are the ones that spring to my mind straight away.

Is a Star Trek total conversion something this community could do? I know each TC has it's own server and site, etc. I wonder if it's possible to pull together some modders to work on something like this. I just happen to have in my possession a interwebs server with 2 complete processor drawers (4 CPU per drawer). I've tested it with vanilla and it works great. It may be useful as a dev server, one as a alpha/beta/live, one as a dev. It has a pro Cisco switch so as long as I provide a decent ISP mbps/upload it can handle a pretty decent load. As a nod to FF, the CPU's and RAM are a bit dated, but I've been checking around and the processors and memory are upgradable.

But back to my original thought, has anyone considered a Star Trek TC mod? I've got a bunch of guys that love ST. The "official" MMORPG is cool, but I think the Freelancer engine has very good possibilities.

FriendlyFire is right. FL can't handle beam weapons. However, with an insanly high refire rate, it could be made to look like beam weapons. Some examples can be seen on Nightstalkers mod.
But with the low player numbers these days, would a modder really want to tackle a project like this? I would go with the SSM mod or Nightstalkers to be honest.

The hack using the fire effect means the beams are always of a fixed length, even if they hit something closer. It looks really bad.

Using high refire rate means the beam curves when you aim and you can see the individual shots then. It's also a major server performance issue.

Yea, FF is right. with no decent beam, there is no decent ST mod. Even the hack doesn't really do the required effect justice. I wonder if folks will be happy to fly around shooting photons at each other? A real Trekkie? No way.

Nexus has properly implemented beam weapons, so I'm not sure what your point is.

I'm building something that may be called a vanilla Trek-ification but its on deep hiatus currently and it isn't in any way designed to be a Trek based mod, apart from visuals (which has its balancing challenges). As for beam weapons... well, you gotta compromise there, that's true. But that's the advantage one can have when not building something that resembles canon Star Trek and thus rationalising away all the issues. I suppose they could be implemented but that would totally ruin the spirit of fighting the limitations of an outdated game for its own sake