It's also do to with Nixonshead starting with NASA-provided open-source models for the image, which are naturally nice and shiny, and I forgot to think of toning the foil texture down to reflect dust buildup--which is funny, because I did think to ask for him to make sure Duncan's suit dust was updated to reflect more than a week of active days on the surface. Oops.Well, if anyone glanced at the NASA paper on preserving the pristine state of legacy landing sites, Lunar landing rockets do a shockingly widespread sort of damage--because the gases flow in a thin layer on the surface at high speeds, and pick up a lot of dust and gravel, which once set in motion tends to just keep on going a long way before it finally loses enough energy (by setting other particles into motion!) to stop. But the lander stage of Intrepid was in the eye of the storm as it were; the Ascent Stage's exhausts were impinging directly on it which did some damage to be sure but it was designed to take it; meanwhile it would have swept all the dust quite away, so any dust found there now must be from later impacts.
As a bit of behind the scenes, the process of creating that image concept (which is also one of my favorites out of the batch, Bahamut) was actually a lot like the post describes it, with Engineer E reading the NASA case study in that report and seeing "top surface of LM" as an inspection target and Author E playing the PAO and thinking, "Man, that'd be a great scene to describe/get an image of."
