try to avoid black armour, I found a nice way to make good looking imitation of End Game ablative armour but cover only few parts of the ship not whole. So to make such armor just fill area you want it there with grey paint (whatever shade you want) then select the area with magic wand tool, apply monochrome gaussian noise, very faint just to avoid plain area, next apply inner bevel to the edges (while still having armour area selected), after that you get nice armour on which you can draw patterns and use on them either outer bevel tool or inner bevel tool to get nice multi-leveled parts... looks much more unique ;) try it I bet it will look bada$$ when finished ;)
btw. you could talk with USS Sovereign so maybe he could help you with making transwarp technology, I guess only thing you need is to rescript Slipstream framework and recolor tunel texture, this could work as a pack ;)
EDIT : here's a basic idea of what I meant, it's just a 5-min work so quality is poor especially on bevels but if you would work on ultra resolution textures and then size them down to high res it would look a lot better
