[-Norbert-]

Except Nexus is extremely capital-oriented to the point that a fighter pilot has the life expectancy of a fruit fly once the flak lasers start firing.

Unless that fighter is a pretorean...

[Nighteyes]

billboarded anamorphic lensflares

Would be possible to have this in FSO?
For the others:
Bloom shader could most likely be edited by somebody who knows how to do it, might be worth trying BTW. 
Thruster trail effects are a matter of getting a good effect maker, we can have effects of that quality, and some mods already do. Syrk comes to mind. Inferno also has such effects, but they haven't been showcased in their full glory. In general, Jesnec's and Nighteyes' trails.

I've been trying to get some of these things to work in FSO, they way glow points are set up in FSO make they ideal to be actual lens flares, so if the modder wants he can add some really big ones on a ships engines as seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oADXodHXS0w&feature=g-upl&context=G2a229f2AUAAAAAAAAAA
they way the lens flares show up can even be adjustem through distance from the ship by editing the mip maps, so they render only when close-mid range distance to the player, and wont render on very far ships)
only problem is they don't actually render as lens flares, meaning they wont render ontop of everything, bringing us back to an old feature request I asked for.

I also don't know how to put trails on ships, I've seen it done on the homeworld 2 mod, IMO on capital ships this can work better then the current way thrusters work, just put there a glow point lens flare, shortish trail and the heat distortion effect and you'r good to go

*edit: just edited the bloom shader in notepad to cover a wider area, pretty straight forward, but it seems like I need to use a higher resolution for it as the bloom itself looks low on pixcels, it would also be nice to be able to use one set of bloom to be "tight" like it is in the mediavps, and ontop of it another wider bloom filter that would give a nice color bleed effect on the sorroundings, bloom intensity should be in a table variable instead of the launcher settings...

[Commander Zane]

In the case of the bloom intensity it does change if you raise or lower the value in the Ship Lab, right?

[Nighteyes]

funny you mention that its the first time I noticed it can be changed like that!
anyway yeah I can still change it through there, but what I was talking about was in the instace where we have 2 bloom shaders working together, then it won't work to have 1 value to determin the intensity of both...
I cranked the intensity all the way up and noticed something strange in the way it rendered the glow, is it supposed to be like this?

[Commander Zane]

That looks like the bloom I used to see before, but the lines are much more extreme.
It shouldn't do that with these effects if you're not using them now.

[Nighteyes]

well I updated the shader, its an improvement but still there are many very visible lines

[Trivial Psychic]

I am not familiar with the source material for this particular mod, but that ship bares a striking resemblance to a miniature Terran Typhon.

[The E]

funny you mention that its the first time I noticed it can be changed like that!
anyway yeah I can still change it through there, but what I was talking about was in the instace where we have 2 bloom shaders working together, then it won't work to have 1 value to determin the intensity of both...
I cranked the intensity all the way up and noticed something strange in the way it rendered the glow, is it supposed to be like this?

If you don't know how the bloom effect works, yes, this is expected.