I do recall Yarlen saying that with the tight memory constraints of Sins, not many more meshes could be put in before it goes over the "safe memory usage" limit. So adding in more ships is probably unlikely, but not impossible. As for re-texturing the current ships to better differentiate the subfactions, that might be possible but I really have no idea if new textures take up less memory than new meshes.
To me personally, I think that adding more ships to Sins at this point might well prove redundant. But if the devs think that they have found a wholly new purpose for a ship in the game, and can fit it into a DLC, I am all for it. I just discourage the addition of meaningless ships (such as, say, a ship between a heavy cruiser and a capital ship). UNIQUE is the key term here. If I did my math right, there are currently 68 distinct ships in Sins, and if you count the trade ships, refinery vessels, fighters, and bombers the number goes up to 82. And that's not even counting the pirate versions of the TEC ships. That is a LOT of ships, and if there are more ships added, they better be different than all 82 others.
One idea that I had is to give the neutral planetary militias that you encounter at the beginning of the game one unique ship. That way, there doesn't need to be three versions of the same idea (for all three factions). And the neutral factions would be different than regular TEC, and the when the TEC Rebels call for Pirate aid from the Broadcast Center then maybe one or a few of those ships might show up too and the player could control them. Actually, this is one place when a heavier heavy cruiser might make sense - but only at certain planets, such as Terran and Oceanic. This ship would probably slow down access to certain planets as it would be too tough to simply engage with a few light frigates, but would make expansion more challenging and gratifying.
It might be easier on memory if the current ships were given faction-specific abilities, but maybe the particle effects for those abilities might also prove taxing. I really am not a modder, and so I have little idea what is the most efficient type of content to add. But I am all for further DLC content. I hope Forbidden Worlds was and is a commercial success.
