Yea, tbh I feel a bit guilty about having to do those changes since Camara was my newbie freighter and has a strong nostalgia factor to me, but those are all balance changes, not really visual tweaks.
Current Camara is actually almost as small as a Liberator from the front, which meant scaling it up to give it more hittable surface in that profile would've made it way too long from top/side, so the tweaks to its proportions were to give it more hittable surface without having to turn it into a broomstick.
Also not all the plates on the mesh are intended for turrets: 7 will likely be a CD slot (this is still being discussed, so subject to change) and 8 is for thruster, so the main change to its turrets is 4, 5 & 6. Most turret steering ships have some "natural limit" to their firing arcs based on the ship's geometry, but Camara being a pre-TS ship, its hardpoint placement doesn't account for that and allows all 6 turrets to have a 360 arc, which combined with its shape makes it an absolute nightmare to deal with when turret steering, so the main balance-related feedback I got when I was first bouncing this around was basically "make it not shoot everything everywhere". Redistributing the hardpoints like this will allows for giving the turrets more balanced arcs without any of the turrets being too limited or any of the profiles suffering too much. The ship might get an extra turret mount if the current set up turns out to be too underwhelming.
tl;dr - Camara has been considered all sorts of problematic balance-wise for quite a while now, so even if this new model doesn't make it in and the old model stays, it'd get a complete balance rework eventually. At least this way by applying the intended balance changes straight to the mesh, the new balance of the ship will also end up making a bit more sense visually, instead of having turrets on the ship that look like they could turn all the way without any trouble, but don't "because balance".
As for the clipping concern for CM and Mine, ye I'll be checking that ingame before submitting the finalized model to make sure it doesn't cause any issues. Just eyeballing it for now, it doesn't look like it'd be a problem, but those can always be moved if they end up needing more room to fit the larger equipment models (cloak and mine).
And since you mentioned it, setting up interchangeable cargopods for freighters (the same way it works for transports) is something I'm looking into, it's just gonna be a bit finicky cause freighter scales are all over the place right now. So that's likely going to happen down the line for all freighters that have pods in their models, but will probably have to wait for after the initial implementation of this. We'll see how it goes.
