One of the great things about Gratuitous Space Battles is that all the data is in plain text format, just begging to be tweaked. I decided to try importing a Star Destroyer into the game. One thing led to another, and before long I'd made an entire mini-campaign, complete with a cheesy story, fighter swarm scenario, frigate swarm scenario, and gratuitously explosive scenario. Normal difficulty is about what you'd expect, but Hard and Expert are significantly harder than the built-in scenarios.
My goal balance-wise was for Hard to be doable using the built-in hulls, races, and weapons. Expert basically kicks it up a notch without adding ships - I only changed starting layout and orders. I'm not sure Expert difficulty is even possible without using my modded hulls and weapons. At least, I couldn't do it!
The readme has hints, brief installation instructions, uninstallation instructions, and a complete list of acknowledgments.
It's not Han Solo's lucky day! 
Star Destroyers are kind of like unstoppable killing machines.
The Rebel fleet dukes it out. 
That thing's operational, and someone's on the wrong end of a superlaser....1 new playable race
12 new ships with custom graphics - X-Wings, Star Destroyers, Millennium Falcon, the Death Star(!), etc etc
New weapons with their own strengths and drawbacks
3 gratuitous scenarios:
- Imperial Pursuit: What if Han Solo decided escaping Darth Vader through the asteroid field was too risky, and to fly straight through a huge alien fleet instead?? Build the alien fleet and find out for yourself.
- Imperial Freelancing: Seeing your potential after the previous mission, Darth Vader has hired you to destroy as much of the Rebel fleet as possible. Let none escape Imperial justice!
- Imperial Downfall: So, you've crushed the Rebellion. Jerk. Now who's going to stop the Death Star?!
Installation
I tested this on a clean install of GSB with my user directory (My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles) cleaned out, and everything worked fine. Hopefully that wasn't a fluke.
1) Download the file here: MediaFire OR from 2shared OR from RapidShare (yuck)
2) Unzip the archive.
3) Move the folders contained to your "Gratuitous Space Battles Beta\data" directory.
4) You're good to go! The new hulls, race, and scenarios should all show up under the appropriate menus.
UPDATE for beta 1.11+ The new tractor beam Cliffski introduced causes a crash if you click on the "Other" or "All" tabs in the ship design. Download the attached starwars.txt race file, unzip and put it in "Gratuitous Space Battles Beta\data" to fix the problem.
1.11fix.zip- 1.11 tractor beam v2 fix
- (1.04 KiB) Downloaded 494 times
IMPORTANT As of beta 1.10, after you first load a new scenario, whatever races you unlocked previously will be unavailable again. The fastest fix for this is as follows.
1) Go to "My Documents\My Games\GratuitousSpaceBattles"
2) Make a backup of "sc.dat" (just in case!)
3) Open "sc.dat" in Notepad (NOT WordPad, MS Word, etc - we need a plain text editor)
4) Scroll down until you see [starwars1], [starwars2], or [starwars3]
5) Under these headings, change "tutorial = 0" to "tutorial = 1" and you're good to go!
It looks like this process has to be repeated each time you open one of my scenarios for the first time. Sorry everyone.
Acknowledgments
Cliffski for the amazing and mod-friendly game :-D
George Lucas for creating a universe of endless possibilities.
Scifi-3D artists Sean Kennedy, Maciek Skawinski, Don Showalter for the models I rendered for this project.
Other artists: Fractalsponge, Gino Dykstra, Cory Harvey, Brandx, Aak193, MetroidPrime, Katase.
