I am currently fooling around with this just to see what I can get away with (using OP). I have modified the shiplist.txt file so that the first race listed is Neutral (the fighter donor) and then Lyran (the PF donor)
I have created 1 new Fed ship intended to be a casual PF tender. feeling destructive at the time, it is a conjectural XBB (heh heh heh) this was added to both Lyran and Federation sections. I also created a PF which was also added to both race sections. The XBB has 2 fighter groups and 2 PFs. Game runs, no crashes.
Testing in skirmish, the ship loads up, the PFs launch and do thier job, nothing crashes so far. The problem is in space dock. Any attempt to change fighters gets "ship not found!", while Lyran PFs are now available to the PF slots. I have seen mention of utilities to check the shiplist.txt and ftrlist.txt files but have been unable to find them so far
As a side question I would love to see SSDs for the Federation Battle Pods, Carrier Pods and Cargo Pods, or at least shipedit exports of same.
Any help with this would be much appreciated.