For the next patch…you can turn the hull layer ‘off’ so its invisible, making for more adventurous designs…
Awesome, thought about something like this 
Will it be possible to move weapon slots too?
Interesting question, aiven. I can’t help but wonder about how much that might potentially tie-in to this functionality.
FINALLY! Thank god! Yes, cliffski is god.
I’ve wanted this since Beta. I never even thought to ask, I just assumed the game would break.
You cannot move turrets, that would be a balance nightmare and mean ships looked a bit too weird. Here is a video with me showing how it works…
youtu.be/02yVgVWdTM0
Something of interest to modders…
You may notice that the ‘composites’ folder that renders out ship layers does not include the turrets. What this means is you can now design a complex component as a ship hull, then fight with it, and the game will thus render out the various graphics files (including the bump map) which you need to make a new modded component for the game 
how is just MOVING the turrets a balancing nightmare?
I wouldn’t say nightmare, but moving the turrets has an effect on gameplay.
I already proposed this some month ago. Read the 4-5 next posts: viewtopic.php?f=43&t=9904&p=69725#p69725
ah yes the discussion i was a part of.
here is the realist in me,
when we don’t have this ability the people who would game the system would just go change the data for the modules,
if we do have the system they will move all the weapons to the front.
the point is, if modding is available, people will make overpowered things, and IMHO i don’t think thats a bad thing, it makes it a challenge to beat those challenges (as the name would imply)
you aren’t forced to play those things, and it won’t change the single player. this happened in gsb1 and no one got mad, thanks to Praetorian Industries. Praetors tried to balance his mod (and if you play honestly using the logic he set up it is still somewhat balanced) but it is still massively overpowered.
simply put, the choice is black in white: we can mod modules slots, or we cannot. There’s no way to truly balance this (that isn’t exceedingly complex to code).