Yeah, that's the whole point.

About ship skins: Have users submit their own skins on the website, and then other users can vote on them (You can vote it upwards or downwards, only p2p players can vote and one per account). Once a skin hits enough votes, its creator gets a token to have the ship repainted for free, and perhaps the skin could be purchased by other users for credits (Unless the creator requested it to be uniquely theirs). The idea being, the user base becomes the fugly skin filter, so the staff need not worry. Perhaps, users can only submit one skin per month, and skins that reach a certain negative limit are automatically deleted.

About the GUI snapshot on the front page: I don't know if it's too late to impact the design, but I personally like having menus and toolbars on the left and right instead of the top on bottom because it's a lot easier to work with when using a widescreen monitor. Instead of being able to see a huge distance to the left and right, and a very short distance to the top and bottom, I'd rather be able to see a fair distance in all directions. It seems like that's already under control though.

I also didn't read through the whole topic yet, but I read the first two and the last two pages, so maybe it was mentioned already.

Forget skins. Ive done some research, and they wont work without a lot of effort. the admins probably know this already though. Perhaps, instead of skinning, make a base in (sol?) that allows you to change the color of your ship. not the color of the entire ship, per say, but certain areas selected on the models. Ive done this in some programming things Ive done, its not very hard to shade certain areas of the 3d model a different color. for example, the stripes on the uz ships, those could be the areas on those ships that could be shaded. on the EF ships, the pods, green areas, and engine exhaust could be changed in color. on the pax, the glow and thrusters on the back could be changed in color. all not very hard to do, and it shouldn't tax the server or the client or the database much. I also think it'd make everyone happy.

TCGM

Skinning a model will not be that difficult. You'll have the existing one to work with and usually will be able to just color the different triangles/sections to make it look the way you want.

I meant skins other players could see also. as has been said in this topic, that'd be too much work and too much manpower needed. My coloring idea would be visible to all players. you guys are doing something along these lines with bases anyways aren't you??

Problem is, considering the overall maturity of the internet, half the playerbase will skin their rhinos to look like dildos.

But they already look like dildos..

Not rhinos - Panters do look like dildos.
But it would be funny to see end result of using rhino as one .

After a few hours of trial and error i did this little edit of the gui with the
existing images to not only see what I could do but also to show you what
can be achieved with the .xml. Every aspect of the gui can be moved and
edited, really is addicting Hopefully we can have a few options for you
to choose from, but it will be great to see what you guys think up. I can
already see a bright yellow smiley gui for pants.