Ah the battle of turkana, used to sneak into my mothers work at lunchtime to play xwing on the office 486. Sadly the mon cals in the first video, like all the xwing series versions are pretty inaccurate to the movie models. XWAu's is probably the best representation so far, gven the limited reference around back then.
Incidentally xwing was the first game i ever modded, could never stop the tie bombers blowing up the redemption in mission four so changed them into tie fighters with a hex editor. didnt have the internet back then
Texturewise i usually work at twice the resolution of the one thats going to be used. Normal maps are good specially for organic shapes, but i dunno, always seemed to me that throwing in an extra few hundred polys, specially on angular space ships, would cause less of a na over head than a second texture and rendering pass. Thats said i dont know that much about it