Actual camoflauge isn't typically all that useful in a PvP scenario. Even where the game has the visual fidelity to pull it off, it is as simple as a shader injection to render it ineffective. Client side only methods of cheating are virtually undetectable in a networked game, and "make every ship glow red" is a 100% client side hack that you can do with commercially avaliable shader enhancers people use every day to make skyrim look nicer. There's no way to prove you did it, and no way to stop you from doing it. As a developer you are simply just trusting players no to do it because you have no way to enforce that.
You're wasting your time trying to work out visual camo in a competitive multiplayer video game for the most part, but lets say we had nothing but honorable non-cheaters in the community just for the sake of argument.
The way SB renders lighting is going to make color camo of dubious usefulness. You've already got to contend with 3d objects versus the skybox, which tend to stick out no matter what color they are, but on top of that you're got some pretty extreme directional light to contend with, as well as a total lack of visual noise usually provided by terrain or other parts of the world. If you're between the viewer and the sun, your camoflauge isn't gonna work anyway and you're going to be entirely pitch black.
If the viewer is between you and the sun you're still not going to have a great time trying to camoflauge yourself as the directional lighting itself is going to naturally pop your silhouette out as the plates angled away are going to appear darker.
You might be able to get some decent results at long range, but due to the high variance in overall luminance of the startfield and the complications of lighting any camo is really only going to be effective within a very narrow "tunnel" where the viewer lines up perfectly with both the light source and the background.
You're probably better off figuring out how to disguise your ship as not a ship than trying to blend in with space for this reason. Camo as a rule isn't effective without a lot of sympathetic elements both in front of and behind the user or tightly controlled viewpoints and lighting conditions. Our brains are hard wired to seek out even the smallest anomalies in empty spaces as a result of millions of years evolving to walk upright so we could see predators or prey from longer distances.
If anything your best bet for camoflauge is to try and disguise your ship and blend in in a field of asteroids or space debris, or simply abuse view distance to remain undetectable with your "Main" ship while piloting a "spotter" ship connected to it.
This method of "render camo" takes advantage of the presence of video game view distance limits is and a common pvp tactic in open world games with a view distance limit. You send one vanguard to scope out the area and put the thing you want to hide (like 40 of that guy's closest friends) a couple hundred meters behind. If your spotter sees something you want to run from, you can be out of the area before anyone knew you were there. If your spotter sees something you want to attack, you simply have the spotter lure the target to you.
Or, if you want to get really fancy have your ship set up to fly be wire and maintain distance to the spotter automatically, and rig up a system specifically to make jumping from your main ship to the spotter and back easy and be your own spotter.
