I'll do my best to comment on the model itself.

Not knowing anything at all about these types of contraptions, you make it
seem believable to me in a mechanical sense, so I won't comment on that.

You mention that the textures need work, so you already recognize that.  You
might try using some nearly imperceptible surface normals, simply to make it
look like tiny paint droplets on the painted surfaces.  It might not help,
but sometimes these things can make an image have a much more realistic
appearance.

Also, the finishes need work (perhaps you were lumping that into the
"textures need working on".  Painted surfaces should have more reflection,
not just specular reflection.

Since this was done with CSG (wasn't it?), you probably don't want to
rewrite the model to use isosurfaces, but by doing so, you could create
"lumpier" metal (for lack of a better term), which was common 100 years ago
or more.  Maybe that same effect could be created with surface normals
(which would certainly render faster).  I'm a big fan of isosurfaces and the
isocsg library, but because of speed constraints they don't always make
sense to use, not to mention the fact that they are much more difficult to
program/script, imho.

Just some thoughts.  It looks like it's coming along very well!  Good luck!

--
Slash

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