It doesn't look like mutliplayer mods work so hot. Specifically, I applied one of the battleship mods locally, then put it on my server. When people logged in to partake in the fun, they crashed when leaving manhattan, presumably because their copy of freelancer was trying to figure out how to render me, but didn't have the data. When I sent the mods to the other players, things returned to normal.

So I fear that if you want to make mods to your server, all the other players who log on must have their files synched with yours/the server. At least that's the conclusion I draw from limited experimentation.

This is, of course, quite disappointing if true for the potential modding community. I suppose someone could develop a 'modded server browser' that applies patches in an rsync like fashion before you connect (calling freelancer directly with -s), but sooo sad.

On the upside, driving battleships around is kinda fun, at least until the novelty wears off.

Actually some modding can be done and working client side without crashing the server, whoever this is limited to "existing" stuff, so you cant make a new ship, or sell engines nd so on...

Whoever you can for example add the Eagle to be sold in Manhattan or add the lvl 10 guns to a base so you can buy them

Thanks for the info guys - I'm going to do some testing today.