I've been holding onto this for a while, and I figured I might as well release it. Behold, now your armor 1X1s and 1X2s are distinguishable! In addition, this mod is fully compatible with multiplayer
http://www.mediafire.com/file/n33jrzf24n11n25/Visible_Armor.zip/file
For anyone who wants to apply this to vanilla directly, copy the two folders next to the mod.txt file, and paste them into C:\Program Files\Cosmoteer\Data\ships\terran
. You'll need administrator permission to do this, and it'll ask you if you want to overwrite folders, which is what you want. This simply overwrites the vanilla armor textures with the ones from the mod. Note that this change will be undone upon updating the game. Enjoy!