Hi Will, the purple damage sounds like a problem with material assignment or something like that. You can see John' screenshots in the Oiler thread, the ship is a wreck and still has the right textures
On John's request, a quick "walkthrough" :
-Make a copy of this ship and clone it.
-Rename the files as explained in my "newsub" tutorial to have a new unit
-Make a copy of the folder of the ship you wish to make playable and
clone it.
-The .dsd, .val & .zon files can be taken as they are from the AI ship, just "reconnect" the IDs (use ctrl-f to check what is linked to what)
-delete your main 3D model chunk and import the one from the AI ship.
-In your .dat, delete the materials. In the AI dat, delete all but the materials, and import them in place of the former in your .dat (on top of the model node)
-click "undo" in the AI dat until the models node are back. Now delete all but the main node. Then delete the main model, label and node but not its children.
-remove the things you will replace in the playable dat (should be the 2 ...B and ...F nodes)
-don't remove the remnants of diveplanes and torpedo doors, the game will CTD
-Save and import the AI dat in your playable dat, set the good parent IDs and materials.
Check how this ship is done, there's no much file, check the texture lines in the roster file, upc file & dat file.
That's a quicky, there's a bit more than that, but it's still not that tough a modification, just do it slowly and try it in game often to isolate eventual CTD causes.