well the thing is, this is the actual ship object (for lack of a better word), not the polymodel, not the ship table data, but the ship in it's highest state that can be diferentiated from any other object type (like asteroids or fireballs), so table changes isn't going to directly affect anything you do to the ship structure, the ship_info struct on the other hand probly would be affected by table changes,
for the record what I changed was the poly_model struct, I have tried changeing something in the ship struct (an index for nameplates) and it ended baddly