You need to uncompress them by using the BINI tool in the downloades section of this site... just drag the file over bini.exe and voila. Hope this answers your question.

oh by the way, it will come out as whatever.ini.txt You need to delete the old .ini and rename whatever.ini.txt to whatever.ini ... I hope that isnt too confusing.

okay which tool in the downloads section is bini.exe? I see two uncompressers...

Its called "Freelancer INI Uncompresser". And I made a mistake, its not in the "downloads" section, its in the "Utilities" section.

nm found it..next question..how do I tell ships apart? I don't understand the nicknames

Well, assuming you opened up shiparch.ini, there are a few things you need to know in order to tell what ship is what. First, you need to look at the actual nichname of the ship... if its li_something, then you know your looking at a Liberty ship. Then if you got that down, then look at things such as number of guns it can hold, and also the CLASS.

For example, if you are looking at the ship nicknamed "li_fighter" and you see it has 4 lvl 3 gun slots, then you know your looking at the Patriot, because its the only Liberty ship that holds exactly 4 guns and is a fighter. I hope this makes sense too.

Yeah, that makes sense...but I'm actually looking at the engine file. I want to do the backwards thrust trick.

I havent really looked into the engines yet, but there are other posts about speed/engines and other stuff like that. I'll bet if you poke around in the other threads you'll find what your looking for.