Thanks for the comments guys, much appreciated
Haven't had that much time to work on it this last week, but I've been fooling around with different texture levels and what you can acheive with different resolution textures on various parts of the hull. Ac3d is starting to make it look a heck of a lot better, and I'm getting there. Just mapping out texture points and layers at the moment, I would've loved to add in bump maps but so far I haven't seen that in Ac3d, maybe in the future?
Anyway, here's a rough image of the basic texture colours and work..