Just a few things that come to mind.
Hue shifting and colouring is simple as pie. The current texture shows a very excellent baseline level of detail. Adding things such as weathering and heat scouring and adjusting the colouring of different areas to more closely resemble the colours seen in the original is very, very simple compared to the job already done.
The retail texture's colour scheme is mostly neutral grey, with brown or red-ish engine intakes. This is, like said, a simple matter of desaturating the texture and colouring the appropriate parts red-brown.
The colours are, at this point, about the most insignificant thing in the texture I can think of. The more important thing is that I can't see any mapping errors such as seams or overtly stretchy bits. The normal mapping is superb, and overall the detail level in the textures very nicely complements the geometry of the model itself.
As far as appearances are concerned, it is a very good thing to have a non-weathered, clean, "factory new" version of the texture available to the community. The Medusas were not always beaten down worn out pieces of scrap, they must've been new once - have you ever seen photos of how brand new fighter airplanes look like? Even though most people tend to think that stuff like WW2 airplanes have matte painting, they are actually rather shiny when they don't have layers of mud, dust and oil accumulated on the surfaces.
By the way, a clean, de-saturated basic texture available to public will also give an opportunity for the rest of the community to create their own skins for ships, for adding squadron markings or colour schemes. Personally, for example, I am very fond of seeing how different ships look with
different types of
camouflage patterns applied on them, or some
completely different colour schemes, just for the fun of seeing how much different texture changes the look and feel of a ship.
Not trying to hijack the thread here, just making a point that in my opinion it would be awesome to have the source files for newly textured ships available for the community, which would make it a lot easier to create alternate re-skins which have in my opinion singularly positive effect on diversity of ships.
So yeah, I hope the source PSD/XCF file can be made available as a modder resource after the ship is finished.
