[bigchunk1]

I must preface this question by saying that what I am about to ask will appear EXTREMELY stupid. I'm not talking about just foolish or even embarrassing or anything like that. I'm saying that what I am about to ask will reveal that I have NO modding experience whatsoever, and it might be surprising that I am able to get out of bed every day without knowing it...

When you FRED missions, you can select the Ulysses, the Loki, and all the ships from vanilla FS2... BUT if you want to make a mod with new ships that are not in Freespace2 how do you FRED a mission that uses them? None of the ships are in the dropdown list no?

I was not kidding when I said it would be stupid. I know that INF has its own FRED which allows you to select ships made for INF but other than that, say I want to import a Rhea bomber or something like that, but I don't see it in FRED. What now? Also, I want to say that I do read things, many things but I have not been fortunate enough that anything I have read involves the answer to this question.  

[General Battuta]

I must preface this question by saying that what I am about to ask will appear EXTREMELY stupid. I'm not talking about just foolish or even embarrassing or anything like that. I'm saying that what I am about to ask will reveal that I have NO modding experience whatsoever, and it might be surprising that I am able to get out of bed every day without knowing it...

When you FRED missions, you can select the Ulysses, the Loki, and all the ships from vanilla FS2... BUT if you want to make a mod with new ships that are not in Freespace2 how do you FRED a mission that uses them? None of the ships are in the dropdown list no?

I was not kidding when I said it would be stupid. I know that INF has its own FRED which allows you to select ships made for INF

No it doesn't. It's FRED like anything else, as far as I know.

but other than that, say I want to import a Rhea bomber or something like that, but I don't see it in FRED. What now? Also, I want to say that I do read things, many things but I have not been fortunate enough that anything I have read involves the answer to this question. 

All you have to do is either set up a shortcut to your FRED executable and add -mod (nameofyourmod) to the command line, or select the mod in the launcher and then run FRED; it should read the launcher's command line. The former method is the one I use.

[Shivan Hunter]

[just covering all bases here]

You'll also need a Ships.tbl or its modular table, ***-shp.tbm, that correctly defines all the varables needed to use the new ship in FS. This file will need to be in Freespace2/YOURMOD/data/tables.

The syntax for ships.tbl is in that link (note that you don't need nearly all of those entries- if you aren't sure which ones, copy something from FreeSpace 2's ships.tbl and use it in your file).