Nice!!

..but why are all the ships "worn" looking? Presumably I can buy a new ship and/or give a ship a quick paintjob just before selling it?

Because there's no way to wear them dynamically, so I texture them with a bit of a wear. Would be odd if ships stayed in mint condition. More odd than having a bit of wear everywhere.
A more elaborate material system could provide that functionality. A while ago I did some such materials in Blender, using some blending shenanigans. and value adjustments, so the concept could work I think.
And if decal support is also implemented, the decals themselves coule also have that.

Just FYI - the pattern shader only samples from the red channel to determine which color to use. Unfortunately, we can't really get any smaller textures by using grayscale patterns as the DXT1/DXT5 formats specifically store three-component color data.

I tried making them from grayscale pngs, but it did not work