Painful changes in architecture but great rewards - skin system

Spent nearly 6 hours yesterday on a simple idea. I need a more robust and simple way to implement different looks to the same building blocks in Junkcraft Armada. After a painful search and replace of hardcoded numbers and creating a more robust and flexible system which actually doesn't add much to the gameplay except for the look I am very happy with the results.

A quick screenshot showcasing  the difference can be seen below.

The blue parts are actually the same builing blocks as the white ones where you can attach different modules, but do have a different sprite representation allowing me to design custom looks to each part with different shapes without having to hardcode any part inside the game code. The change allows a very large number of skins and will make the game more enjoyable to play since graphics will jump in quality and will add a lot of variety. Players will start with the basic ones and as your ship progress you will be able to change the way your ship looks and also how it plays, allowing the player to design very interesting ships including ships from other games if they want, all the ships provided in game will be original ships but custom parts will allow players to shape the ship as they like.

Modding in the future may be possible for the Windows version, but for the first release I will only allow the standard pieces delivered with the game, otherwise the release date will be too far in the future and I want to release this game before the year ends.