Yes, I also think the mission designer should be the one to set up the ambient light. However with this technique there is no ambient light anymore(!)
It all depends on your skybox.
The question is, do we want an additional ambient light, or do we just need the ability to change the color/brightness of the blurred env map?
Idea is to have diffuse and specular light contribution from the 'env map', and thus get almost perfect lighting for the ships.
You handle it as light and use same textures for masking as you would for specular and diffuse light.
Biggest good thing is that this allows you to have pretty much complete control over the ambient, including animation and such.
Basically you could write the old ambient term to the texture and it would look quite close to the old one. (except it would take normals and specular into an account.
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