All the Colors of the Rainbow Redux

Last week, we talked about Privateer 2's palette feature which allows any ship to appear in the livery of any of twelve factions. We didn't mention that this was being noted in the service of helping AllTinker add the correct default style for every ship in a future release of the incredible Originator. There were actually two additional options we didn't show in the last post: the Heretic's actual color yellow and blue scheme and this final seemingly unused one (note how this one also changes the color of the cockpit glass from green to blue).

In this process of studying this, we did manage to find somewhere in Privateer 2 that the system is actually used: for generating the 'booth database' images of ships! If you look closely at the different registration entries (and a few other places) you'll see different ships appear in all sorts of different colors! The system isn't actually used internally but it's obvious the game's artists captured them in whatever the dev environment was like. Take this Kalrechi, for example, which matches exactly with three different palettes you saw last week.

We've gone ahead and cataloged 130 different ships that appear in booth imagery and identified the color scheme for each one! Also included are the 'poster' images included in Origin's Official Guide to Privateer 2, most of which are taken from this same source. The full spreadsheet is available here; check the additional tabs for the booth database and the palette key.

What about the Heretic on the US cover? That's painted from the ship used on the booth splash screen by Origin artist Sam Yeates and it seems like it must have originally been a Heretic in military colors (with additional details added during the paintover). What about the stripes? From the Freij imagery you can see that the build of the game used for capturing the booth ships actually used the 'victory stripes' in more places and that they were replaced by black-and-yellow diamonds for the release! (Note also that the monochrome versions in the manual have the diamond texture.)