Hello, apparently im in charge of the art style for the nomads.
anyway, the reason they are changed to black is that having such a strongly coloured base colour of orange makes no sense when their official faction colour is also orange. whats more is that orange clashes with other colours - the base colour should be something neutral, and if you look at the other factions you will notice their base colours are all quite desaturated, ranging from black to white to mirrored.
the nomads project has quite some ambitions in changing the units looks, and a lot of the models are planned to be replaced, i hope you will like the new models more : )
so to have the new models fit in the nomads got a colour scheme change which lets us replace one model at a time and not be forced to replaced them all at once.
heres a preview of a (wip) nomads acu model:
theres still some work to be done on it so its subject to change but this is kinda gonna be the new look or something.
about unit firing lasers - thats not the intention - they are supposed to use mostly conventional fragmentation munitions, as a cheap way of solving the gun problem.
if there are some specific effects you dont like then take screens of them and maybe they will change as a result
the nuke was indeed the funniest thing about them, and im not sure its a good idea since nomads isnt a joke mod xD sorry but the faction symbol was kinda ridiculous.