Portrait images should be 256x256 in PNG format.
Logos should be 128x128 PNG format.
The UP video should be a 128x128 video in BNK format.
The trade videos are 393x256 BNKs, but you can make them larger so long as the same aspect ratio is kept and it should work fine.

If you have DA, put them in the appropriate folders under My Documents\My Games\GC2DarkAvatar\Gfx. If you're playing GC2 it will need to go in the mods folder, with some manual tweaks to the raceconfigs to get the movies to show up, AFAIK.



As to the ships, you can determine the starting ships with a custom map. If you want it that way on a regular random map though, the best you can do is mod the starting ships in GC2ships.xml and remove the survey module and whatever else you want gone. The game will crash if you remove the definitions for those ships completely. Probably the best you can do if you want to be rid of scouts is make sensor modules much more expensive, since players/AIs can just design their own scouts if they want them.