thanks for your compliments, and the death to angelfire mentality, which i fully support.
to adress karma's comment: i use

of freespace textures as templates, and use

of the tiles that come with freespace. the ship that has the most custom texture work would have to be the maelstrom, me and my niece (age 5) spent hours working on that blue hexagonal pattern, (my niece, tracey, came up with the idea of making it blue, instread of my usual shade of grey). the texture with the green lights i made for that ship used a freespace tile as a backdrop, i overlayed 2 original textures on top that i made with xenofx (a photoshop plugin suite). the charlatan was made using only the 3 knossos textures as a template, the textures on that ship were severly modified from their original form. the ragnarok and valhalla textures were based off the fenris criuser, again if you looked at my textures and the original base textures, they would look distinctly different. i still havent developed enough skill to do a %100 from scratch texture. my best bet is to expand my own tile library, and use those for base textures, instead of the freespace ones.
the shivan fighter, succubus (a word i first heard in an episode of southpark, and later in a dimmu borgir song, simply meaning a female demon), only apears silver because of the way i rendered it in truespace. the vrml scene of the fighter also has a lighting bug that also makes the ship apear silver. in the game it appears as dark grey. a realistic silver apearance could only be done with a pixel shader in my opinion. the maelstrom dose kinda look vasudan now that you bring it up, probibly the green lights texture, i meant it to be terran, but even i dont know what my ship will look litke till its done.