Most good games allow re-skin mod packs, and they're a good dodge for visual disconnects like the one you've highlighted -- I do not plan to redraw the side-on images of these ships -- because when a player loads up a mod pack they're choosing to accept that by often partially overriding the original art direction for a game they're introducing possible visual disconnects; by conscious action they're deciding to 'see past' them.
I submitted a fair number of art assets to AI War, and a lot of them were used, but it was difficult to find an art style that fitted in with the rest of the game and to stick to it. (In the end I chose the original pixel art style over the newer 'render' art approaches.) At the time the lack of coherent art direction for AI War was one of my overriding whines about the game - that's okay, at the time Arcen were mostly ideas men and coders, not necessarily artists. (To be honest with you I wasn't a fan of the new 'render' art stylings. Not just because they were inconsistently implemented alongside pixel art but mostly because they weren't pixel art themselves; pixel art has a certain timeless quality to it when done well whereas 'render' art tends to age very rapidly.)
I suppose what I'm gradually heading towards here is my support of making these TLF assets a mod pack rather than having them ship as direct replacements, largely in the interests of hiding the likely resultant visual disconnect between the menus and the game itself behind informed player choice.
I'm going to bundle these all up into a pack and make it available for players to use no matter what Chris ultimately decides to do with these, if anything.
