My FREDing skills are nonexistent, so I think I'd just delegate any actual modding to volunteers who knew what they were doing. Even before that, though, I'd have to write an outline of a script for the entire campaign.
I'm afraid that's not going to work. The number of people actively FREDing isn't as big as it used to be, and most of them work on their own projects. Assembling a modpack isn't that difficult, and learning to use FRED isn't either. There have been 2 people (Strygon and Colt) that came to HLP and released good/very good stuff not long after. TBH, just saying "I do the writing, the rest has to be done by others" is probably not drawing people in; and it'll leave your campaign depending on voluntary work of others.
If your campaign is set 20 years after Capella you don't have to change much - use FS2 as base, remove all Great War era ships, add some ships/weapons and that's it.
Judging from some of the pics of new ships I've seen since I got back, replacing the Great War stuff with the new stuff would be ideal, assuming I can pull it off. I have no idea how to create new animations or stuff like that; the mods that managed to make those and especially mods that managed to get voice acting done are truly impressive.
I never got around to designing Shivan Grid 1...
Not true!
Here're 2 things I once reclaimed from the Webarchive.
Holy crap! I
really forgot about all this. Jesus, I don't even have a copy of Adobe Photoshop and didn't want to buy one. Now I think I might have to, if only to take a look at these squadron logos (even if half of them are from the original FS2). I don't know any other way to look at pcx. files, especially not any way to look at them without paying for a new program I don't really need (that much)....
EDIT: Just found a Microsoft Store special on Free File Viewers, so looks like I am getting it for free after all. I love serendipity!
Now that I think about it, that map of Shivan space is perhaps too small....
I totally forgot about that squadron list I made. Now I don't have to re-brainstorm a bunch of squadron names!
By the by, I just started re-reading the original
Lost Fleet series for DatDB inspiration, although I have to get back to the sequel series (
Lost Fleet: Frontier) because in that one, Geary has to deal with making first contact with
three separate alien species, and only one of them is friendly. Looks like I'll be taking notes while I read both
Lost Fleet series this time around.