... also the normal map is not apparent at all...
Why, because the surface texture isn't visible from 3 klicks away? Contrary to popular opinion, surface noise doesn't need to be implicit in the normal map and I have yet to see a case where it has been done well.
Tech bits and panel lines, that is all a normal map needs for a ship. You don't make a normal map by having the end result looking like somebody rolled silly putty over the diffuse.
I suppose you'd want something more like this:
no, that looks really bad, I was not talking about the hull "dirt" bumps, those are fine enough being only on the spec map, what I'm talking about is the dark panel lines, those IMO should be visible from a decent distance...
same on the Scorpion, I agree it has a bit too much noise on the bump map and not enough emphasis on the panel lines, mjn.mixael maybe try starting off with a white background when creating the normal map and adding on top of that the panel lines in black, and another layer with very low opacity for the noise, to me it seems you are generating the normal map from the diffuse map, so there is not much contrast from the dark body to the dark lines.
these are just suggestions and I don't mean to disrespect, all in all great work, if I had time I would help with the workload
