thats what happens when you use the same photoshop styles over and over again. i used like 10 new ones here though. every time i make a ship i add a few to the library, i literally have hundreds of styles and patterns defined. it has become troublesome to have too keep all theese photoshop settings properly backed up. i made 4 new tiles to use as patterns (though i ended up only using a couple of em). of course i save everything, never know when it comes in handy.
as for the ship consistancy i started thinking about guidelines for a specific group of ships. for pirates i do a hybrid terran/vasudan look. i use mostly earth colors, stonelike metals, some bioplating, a more industrial more retro look. post capella gtva is kinda curvyer than what we saw in fs2. like the main armor belt on the valhalla and ragnarok is jagged shivan-esq looking, albeit in terran colors. they have more color in them than youd expect from a terran ship. i get into habbits though, i tried really hard to make theese two ships look not-pirate.
vasudan and shivans i kinda keep with the styles defined in the fs universe. i only have 3 vasudan fighters, an ancients fighter, 1 shivan fighter, and the dante. all of those pretty much keep with the style. the shivan ships were probibly the easyest. dante took me a very small amount of time to create. time was saved using tiles. the succubus fighter was also a fairly easy ship to make, its polycount isnt much and its texture is a cheap rip and tear of other shivan fighter textures. the ancients fighter is about the same. the seker was my first vasudan fighter, it was very low poly and had a rip and tear texture, i upped the polycount a little but never got around to retexing it. apis and atlas soon followed. ive been making some of theese ships sence ong before the scp ever started.
most of the work i do for nukemod is refining old stuf. i spend the last month rebuilding and retexturing the ragnarok class. i was too displeased with the texture detail, and the fact that it was just a rip and tear of the fenris texture. all my early models used that rip and tear texturing meathod, now that im more profietient in photoshop i wanna go back and fix that, usually remodeling the whole ship from scratch. only about half my ships have fully original textures. lately ive been doing exclusivly original texture work. and i like the way its working out.