Its not clear to me what you already know about textures and how the are used, so it's kinda hard to explain. Furthermore I never looked into the nomad outpost textures, so I'm not really sure if they differ from other textures.

Anyway, you'll need the UTF editor to open up the .mat files that contain the textures. If you don't already have it, download it.

Some notes: although skinning planets is relatively easy technically speaking (it's just a matter of importing bitmaps and use the right references in the accompanying files, no crappy VMesh names), the results are often not that good, aesthetically speaking. Planets in FL are actually textured like if they are cubes, with the 6 sides of it kind ofinflated to make the cube spherical. This distorts the texture, and I have found it virtually impossible to overcome these problems:

- the curvature: if you'd put a horizontal band on the non-polar sides of a planet, it wouldn't go straight, but would appear to be broader at the middle of a texture than at its edges. If you creat landmasses, this is not a problem because their outlines will be kinda random anyway, but if you'd be using an artificial looking texture, it will show and look bad.

- the edges of a side (where sides meet) are always visible when you come near a planet. Even with the stock planets that came eith Freelancer, this is the case.

Argh introduced a "pretty planet project" in Toolkit 1.3, which does not use the stock .sph files but a custom model. This might be skinned easier (i never worked with it), but it does look less like a sphere than the .sph files do (this makes sense as it's actually a polyhedron.)

Btw, another advantage of using a custom 3d model instead of an .sph is that you could make it a bit "flattened". The distance between the poles of a planet is usually shorter than its equator, especially with large planets like Jupiter or Saturn. But I digress