Looks pretty good to me. I have no idea what fire-down-normals is, but I'd be fine with the nameplate if the background wasn't a random rectangle of dark grey.
Like I said, it's just the way Valathil's shadows interact with the nameplate. The same thing happens on the UEF ships. If you use a 3.6.14 build, it doesn't show up. The only way to avoid it is either to have the nameplate so close to the hull you get flickering (like on the Diomedes, and even then it's iffy), or to have an integrated nameplate (like on the Orion), rather than a separate object.
Fire down normals basically makes the weapon only fire in the direction it's facing (its normal, you can get a good explanation of what that is in the texturing tutorial in the modding section), directly along gun barrels and the like. I wasn't aware it had problems.