[StargateSpankyHam]

For some reason, despite editing the ships.tbl entry, the retail shivan fighters (now all player-fliable), are still showing up in FRED and the game with all the default weapons (such as "trebuchet#shivan" instead of its new counterpart "Spectre".) My goal is to get them to spawn with default payloads, so I don't have to manually edit them mission-to-mission while fredding.

I even went so far as to completely DELETE every superfluous secondary weapon, including all the dogfight weapons, from the weapons.tbl file. Despite no weapon now existing by the name of trebuchet#shivan, it still spawns in, at the end of the weapons drop-down FRED menu.

Even worse, when I change the secondary payload space for the retail shivan fighters, it has no effect whatsoever - just as changing the default weapon spawns had no effect.

Now, it is worth noting that the fighters that are not from retail FS2 work flawlessly (Scorpion, Chimera, Gorgon, Hydra, and Yali). But, last I checked, the ships.tbl entry of the mod being run has the final say as to how the ships behave, right? I thought that nothing could override it.

It might have something to do with the modular .tbm's I have, but all they are is two components of the fury AI, the glide, and the velocity indicator. I'd open them up and take a look, but I do not have a .tbm file viewer/editor. Does one exist?

[General Battuta]

Do you have the mediavps in your mod.ini? Sounds like they might be overwriting your primary mod.

[Scourge of Ages]

You are of course remembering to edit your ships.tbl (or .tbm) to include your weapons under $Allowed SBanks and $Default SBanks?
Other than that, I don't know.

As far as I remember about tbl priority, it's whatever table in your primary mod takes precedence, followed by tables in secondary mods. .tbms also take priority over .tbls, iirc.

[Droid803]

Just make a blank TBM with the same name as the one in the mediavps. (Or not blank, just extract the one from the mediavps, then delete the entries that replace the shivan default weapons).
Then you can override the TBM that's overriding your TBL!

(or just not use the mediavps, but that...might be a lot more work)

[Qent]

For some reason, despite editing the ships.tbl entry, the retail shivan fighters (now all player-fliable), are still showing up in FRED and the game with all the default weapons (such as "trebuchet#shivan" instead of its new counterpart "Spectre".) My goal is to get them to spawn with default payloads, so I don't have to manually edit them mission-to-mission while fredding.

I even went so far as to completely DELETE every superfluous secondary weapon, including all the dogfight weapons, from the weapons.tbl file. Despite no weapon now existing by the name of trebuchet#shivan, it still spawns in, at the end of the weapons drop-down FRED menu.

I would avoid editing the TBL files whenever possible. One reason is that modular tables make everything look cleaner, and another is that

the ships.tbl entry of the mod being run has the final say as to how the ships behave

is not quite correct. The TBM files of your mod have the final say. TBMs always override TBLs, even if their mod has a lower priority, so it sounds like the TBMs in the MediaVPs are overriding the values you put in ships.tbl.

I don't know what's going on with the secondary capacities, since those aren't set in the MediaVPs AFAIK.

I do not have a .tbm file viewer/editor. Does one exist?

Any text editor will do, same as for TBLs.

[StargateSpankyHam]

yep, "mv_assets-shp.tbm" in the mediavps was screwing me up. All new secondaries now work perfectly. The new one in my mod's table folder just says:

#Ship Classes
#end

Somehow, I must have forgotten that I used notepad previously to edit a .tbm file.