I love your basic idea, I would love to see a mod that infuses more of a combat feel into the game.  I would like to see basic naval ship stuctures.  Some things I am not sure that they are even possible, but if so, perhaps instead of size hulls you could go "designs" of "roles" such as bomber, destroyer, crusier.  They would be a combination of size and some additional bonus.  Like Cruisers are traditional large hulls simmilar to Battleships but they trade off defense for speed.  So maybe a cruiser hull has with it a plus one movement built in?  I would also like to see the weapons fleshed out,  the same guns on capital ships should not be on fighters and bombers.  Instead they should have their own lines of weapons, such as AA gun research for capital ships, fighter weapons which have a bonus against bombers, bomber weapons, bombs missles and anti capital guns that have advantages against capital ships. 

Also how about officer academies tech trees , which is already there I guess with the war colleges, but you could always flesh it out, with a top gun fighter program and fleet tactics schools, that might improve logistics and the effectiveness of a fleets fire power.

Multiply the values of 'Productivity' elements (buildings, bonuses, etc) and you'd certainly accelerate combat!

In fact, while i think about it more, my X-Worlds mod IS such a thing with its extra sets of 71 new planetary improvements.

can't wait for BL to come...

the TBL team has started work again. Macmatt and I are working on organizing the techs before we move on. everything got a bit disorganized when we swapped from DA to TA. Another great problem has been the lack of a texturer. We've recently recruited one, but i haven't heard from him since he agreed to take the job.

Another thing, between school, homework and holidays, i personally don't have that much time for this...Lately i've been working more, whereas during the summer, i was always too tired to work on the mod. Hopefully an alpha version will be released sometime in 09. I don't know what it will include, but i plan on a release.

If you join the team, maybe it'll be your dev version too

-Dave