I ported the changes into experimental on my local machine and tested them out last night. A few questions/observations:
Right now, each hull can have up to seven segments. Is it possible to vary that number? It looked to me like it was fixed based on the fact that there are 7 types of cargo holds. If possible, my thought would be to maybe vary that based on ship type (some ships have more decks than others?) or reduce it across the board (7 clicks is a lot to provision a ship... maybe some standardized layouts could help, but that could clutter things up again...)
The Brig and Schooner holds show a trail of icons behind the parent ship, the others do not. Was that intentional, or am I missing something in my build? I put that new .pak file in the Holds folder (still not sure how that works... is it some extra precompiled logic that's automatically included?), made sure the new image file was included, and updated my buildALL.mos file with the new line you put in SVN.
Do you plan to rework the other large ships (Windjammer, Handysize) similarly? I'd think it would be useful and realistic to have a container ship carrying a variety of different goods.
It's now in SVN so feel free to test. Greenling, you are more then welcome to use a similar concept or even reuse graphics if you wish.