A new approach!! On a simulation freeware addon site, I found an addon for Orbiter 2010 which brings the whole shuttle fleet to the simulator. The addon includes texture files for the whole fleet, including early Columbia....
Arvydas shared his magnificent work, a realistic model with textures from Orbiter 2010 some time ago, and I started to wonder if I could somehow cut up the textures into pieces and paste it on the model. It somehow works.
I couldn't seem to "warp" the texture, especially on the nose, so I cropped tiny patches of around 9 tiles and arranged them to look curved. This made the file exceed 200MB (I know... A single page...)but I'm sure it would be much much smaller when I convert it to a raster file. Here's some snapshots.
