Hi AncientSion,
Its really interesting that you decided to design the League ships by the "outdated" design scrapes found on the thescrolls when they usually have less fancy designs according the SCS (mostly, more boring and/or just retrofitted hulls from the major 4).
The main reason for using both ITF (Sierra's Into The Fire) and SCS ships is due to the required amount of ship designs, and since as far as I know these sources are considered official (but not cannon). As you have surely noticed league factions tend to be "underdeveloped" in comparison with the major species, there is a lot of stuff and designs for the major ones but little for the minor factions, thats why I use as many sources as possible, some of the ships already in-game are even fan-based designs, and even some of those are my own designs.
In fact, i like it. I have been playing around with the Abbai and Hyach design file as well, but i find it really hard to get a complete look at the coherent design based on just a single ship.
so to say: the single ships shown on the scrolls indicate that the lesser races each have really unique designs. I have been bending my head trying to figure out a "look" of Abbai and Hyach fleet ships, but having just one ship to work from is really hard. I wish there were 2 or 3 ships to work from.
You are absolutely right about this, getting the identity for a species based on a single design is quite difficult (that is another reason of using multiple sources), whenever I have run into this situation I try to get as much data as possible about the particular species I'm working on, not just ship desings, but also the background behind them (history, natural habitats, homeworld, economics, political views, society, etc...).
As mentioned a given species ship design style is based on the species identity, take the Narn for example, their red (aggressive) coloured ships with war-paint that look more advanced than they really are, that look is meant as a display of force, to hinder potential foes from attacking, and to show their continuous growth to the Centauri.
The Minbari ships are a reflection of their homeworld (blue fish-like ships). Human ship style shows the industrious nature of the species. Vorlon and shadow ships are reflections of their own creators. Drazi ships are like birds of prey, showing their aggressiveness, they aren't meant to fight defensively but to be agile and stricke decisively. etc...
There is also the point of difference in styles from SCS and ITF, but that is easily explainable; one of the reasons for the creation of the league was keeping the Centauri at bay, however, when the Dilgar came it became pretty obvious that they were not ready to face a fully determined (and equiped) enemy, a shift in their mindset is understandable, and some of the league races (precisely the Abbai and Hyach) do have the technology required to make such "unique" ships, that - IMHO - are nothing but the first generation of ship designs after the Dilgar war.
Do you have ideas for more Abbai and Hyach ships like the one the from the scrolls or do you intent to stick with the official SCS outlays ?
For the mean time I intend to stick with SCS and some other sources as stated in the ship table; currently we have 3 LoNAW factions, once the mod have all of these and a few other features we have planned we will look into making some LoNAW species into full game factions, at that moment I might need sources or as previously mentioned my very own desings, of course, by that time those factions will already have an identity well defined (or at least a good enough identity to work from).