Looking further at this, it reminds me very much of the 'popping' affect you see with 3d terrains. The model sort of changes shape, but as you get closer to it, it reassembles in the same way that terrains distort at a distance. What exactly causes popping and what's the solution? As I said above, I wrote another mini-program to get my ships to fly around the camera and they're absolutely fine, so something I'm doing with my camera and/or lights in my main program is obviously causing a problem.