An idea I have just thought of....

When creating a ship, would it be possible that you could add art work to the ships "Hard points". these could be transparant gifs, which would automatically wrapp round the surface of the ship conponent.

Doing this could enable you to add different colours, battle damage scoring, cracks to glass and other damage. you could then also add custom logos.

Not only would this give more variety on how ships look, but it would add a good story element to the game. You could create personisled squadrons, add battle damage to a ship after combat (in a role play/ modify& upgrade ship route) as well as adding kills etc.

Just a silly idea i know, but what do you think?