I've installed vegastrike and the privateer mods on several computers and different operating systems and IMO there's something wrong with the lighting-model. Sofar I've not been able to get materials and textures to work. Per pixel specular lighting produces the best results, but even then you need almost black specmaps. To illustrate take a look at these screenshots I've taken where I've replaced the Llama for Blenders mascot.
I've set the diff to 0,8 and the spec to 0,2 (which alone should result in a very low specular value). In the specmap I've given the gray-paint a value of 0% (black), the green paint 11% and the bare metal ranges between values of 75 and 90%. As you can see from the screenshots the metal looks good, which is odd for a spec value of 0,2. Keep in mind that only a mirror should come close to a spec of 1,0. The green paint looks okay for a glossy paint, but with spec set to 0,2 and a specmap value set to 11% this leaves very little room for subtle specular-effects. Even the gray-material doesn't look matte. Does anyone know how to fix this?
I've also been looking at the current shipmodels and there seems to be no consistency in material settings. In Gemini Gold for example all the specmaps are plain black and white (not even grayscale) and I've seen material settings with both the diffuse and specular components set to 1 (In other words a nonexistent material which looks terrible in every 3d application that I know of). Almost all current models (vegastrike and the mods) could do with an overhaul IMO to get rid of the ridiculous shininess i.e. very light materials with high diff AND high spec PLUS an extreme reflective envmap. Maybe at the same time use Blenders bake to texture to give the models baked in ambient occlusion. Even without new models or the Ogre3D render this should improve the visuals a lot.