altering ship specs

Is it possible to alter the basic ship specs in FRED and make a variant? I was thinking of trying to make a mission where you have to scan things and are basically unarmed but incredibly fast. There are other scenarios I could think of where you would want to alter the base characteistics of a particular class of ship, but I am not sure Fred can do it. Please advise. Thanks.

ship stats are set in ships.tbl, not in FRED.

meaning they cannot be altered by FRED or any other available software I take it. Will a tool be released later to modify them?

However, I would recommend having a small modular table which only contains whatever you want to alter rather than browsing through the whole table.

If you want to read more about tables, I suggest looking at this page on the Freespace wiki, and the ship table in particular. However, since WCS forked out some times ago, not every feature you'll find on the Freespace wiki can be used in Saga, anything post 3.6.12 won't work, and I'm guessing not everything from 3.6.12 is present in Saga either. Not to mention that Saga-exclusive features won't be documented at all on the Freespace Wiki.

Hello, I'm also trying to change ship specs.
I tried to edit the .vp files with some .vp editors, but the I cannot save the changes.

Can you please explain, step by step, how to do the changes? Thanks!

No problem, here's a little FS modding 101:

First rule: don't alter the .vp files provided with a mod/game, ever. There are a few reasons for this, it gives you something to fall back to if your modifications break something. It also allows the modders to detect whether the .vp files have been corrupted (a common source of error).

Second rule, use modular tables (.tbm files) wherever you can instead of full tables (.tbl files), unless you are doing a total conversion/full game. As a beginner modder, just extract the full table and modify that. Once you are a little more comfortable, you can convert your big .tbl into a small .tbm that only contains your alteration of a ship's specs.
EDIT - what Tolwyn said.

In any case, it's always usefull to have the original tables hanging around, for reference purpose.

If you want, I could guide on how to convert your modified ships.tbl/weapons.tbl into xxx-shp.tbm/xxx-wep.tbm files.
EDIT - In this thread , you can see an exemple of a weapon modular table. Creating a ship modular table works the same way: $Name: ship class specifies the name of the ship you want to modify ; +nocreate basically tells the game to alter an existing ship class if it exists (and do nothing if it doesn't exist); everything after that will override the original corresponding entry.

Okay, so it's a lot easier than I thought...
So I extract the .tbm files, and edit them with Notepad.
Place them in "main directory\data\tables", but I don't need to make by myself a .vp file after editing the .tbm file, I just put them in a normal folder, right?