Personal/Faction Colours and Pattern Templates for Grids

Problem: We often recolourise blueprinted ships in our favourite colours. The current way of colour application is slapdash like pouring a bucket of paint. Everytime we recolourise a grid, we have to draw the pattern again and remember where it looks good to apply stripes or highlights.

Background: In the station contest, you said that one colour of the submitted stations would be replaced by a faction colour... Can we use that same approach in normal gameplay, too?

Idea: Can you make an extra layer that remembers where the background colour and the stripes and highlights were, so we don't lose a nice pattern? (Possibly colour and texture need to be two separate layers, not sure without seeing it.)

Example:

1. I set my colour variables A, B, C to my favourite colours and textures.
   
2. I enable the layer and paint my ship with a pattern in ABC (not in three explicit colours).
3. I upload the blueprint.
4. Someone else downloads the blueprint.
   
5. They set ABC to their favourite colour&texture scheme.
6. They can now choose for that grid:

• They enable the layer, and my ABC pattern appears in their colour scheme. Or
  
• They enable the layer, but paint a custom ABC pattern over mine, and the new pattern appears in their colour scheme. Or
  
• They keep the layer disabled and paint explicit colours, ignoring my pattern (same as we do today). <- default

Suggested rules:

If the player toggles between these two layers, and colours or ABC are undefined, the blocks appear as gray.

Would be nice to have multiple named colour presets to switch to: Shared faction colour presets, and my own.

The faction leader sharing a template with DLC textures needs to have the DLC, but faction members without DLC can use the template, as if the DLC owner had personally painted their ships.

When the faction leader updates a shared colour template, all faction ships (who use the template on that server) change at the same time. :-) Well, would be a cool effect anyway.