Back in the day GC2 was probably the very first game I ever did any major mod work for (major for my limited skill at least). It was all for my personal game and I didn't come to the website, didn't do community stuff, and as far as code I could only (and still can only) do basic xml edits by following instructions. I was able to accomplish a few things though and made probably about 20 or so extra races and factions from my favorite sci-fi shows and movies. Getting the race pictures in and editing the flavor text was all pretty easy. Once you make one race and get it working you just use it as a template and keep going. Making the ships in the creator was easy, though time consuming. The hardest thing was getting the created race to use the ships I made for them which if I remember correctly involved me having to either edit the install files or to make a new string which is about as complex as I get. Tweaking race behavior was easy enough with xml values for the most basic stuff were pretty self explanatory.
To get to the point though since this is only a intro post, here's what I propose.
There's been plenty of Awesome ships in the Post Your Gal Civ III Ship Designs! thread. Many of which from races and factions we'll all be wanting to use. The U.S.F.W. "mod" will be nothing more than collections of completed races, with full fleets matching their particular universes cannon. Not even a packaged mod unless we all decide to package them per franchise, which would make sense since we don't all like the same sci-fis. In my old game I had all of my favorite Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate SG1, Atlantis, Babylon5, and Battlestar Galactica factions. I also used a bunch of races from those universes who weren't major on their shows as minor factions, like the Betazoids from ST:TNG were a minor faction in my game. They used stock game fleets or random and never had more than a couple ships. They were just a reskin and flavor of the standard minors.
List Your Favorites:
Star Trek: The Federation, Klingons, Romulans, Borg, Species 8472, Cardasians, Ferengi, If it has a full compliment sized fleet in the cannon and lore we can model from, which these all do as they are in Star Trek Armada and online having pictures to work from is no problem.
Star Wars: Rebel, Empire, and Trade Federation Droid Fleet designs are obvious and easy.
Babylon 5: My memory is a little foggy on some names and spelling here. The Earth Forces/or Babylon5 Forces, M'bari, Shadows, Vorlorns. Not sure about some Vorlorn designs, but all the rest we more or less have a full compliment for to work from.
Stargate and Atlantis: Earth Forces, Goa'uld, Asgardians, The Wraith, The Ancients, had all these as well.
Battlestar Galactica: The Humans and the Cylons. Old school and new school variants.
Mass Effect universe races and factions ship designs. I didn't have these my-self, but anything "Space" goes, including races from games, particularly if they already have a full fleet of ships to model from.
The important part is that for a major faction, whatever your show, game, movie, etc etc, that there be a good model base of at least 5 or 6 ships from their cannon universe to flesh them out recognizably. No *creative license* making up ships to fill in gaps. We can keep stuff like that in our personal games if we want, but I'd rather not do that with Franchise/Universe/Race packages. The point of us using them is we want to be as close to their "official" cannon as possible within the game's rules. Also, no uber buffing. The highest buffs allowed to retain a game balance and yet match that universes cannon must be limited to "vanilla" adjustments. Borg can be like the Yor for instance, with Yor Max type stats, but no +500% anything or something unbalancing. We don't want to play the same game over and over again and have any one race be too overpowering. If you want to super buff your favorites you can edit those xml values easily after you download a "balanced" universe/race/faction package.
List you favorites in your reply 
Voting on Favorite Designs:
With so many awesome ships being made, we can vote as a community on which we like better for which packages, or go with our favorite modder's package for that race, or make your own. I know I can't make all these in a reasonable timetable my-self, and when there's good ones here already I want to use the best of the best. I can make some pretty decent approximations (see below) but I've seen some ships floating around that far surpass my skill.
I can only find part of my old GC2 assets, but I did find a model I had made in the ship editor. It's just the blank unskinned model the ship builder uses made out of standard parts. I just can't load it up without re-installing the old build and mod which I don't have anymore. Guess what it is and you win...um, I don't know. Super awesome gloating rights. I'll give you a hint though. It's a ship from a race I mentioned above, and it's a pretty bad azz one.
Or you could always cheat and follow the link back to the name..lol