How would you want to do that without textures...
Everything on a model is a texture... even letters

I meant without editing the base ship textures.
Have the names superimposed on top of the textures so that each player has his/her name printed on the side of their ship. not a functional mod, purely for looks but it would still be very cool to have for multiplayer. It would probably have to somehow work along with the identifaction system for each player to have their name on their ship. I thought that it could somehow be tied into the damage/effects code so that the players name is retrieved and then the letters are rendered in as decals.