I love when games have physical manifestations of upgrades, i find it increases immersion and variation from character to character. So moving onto my main point, i believe more than the colour of your armor should be varied, I believe you should be able to create different forms of armor that do different things, since this is a very broad statement let me elaborate.
You are part of the main troops of a small army preparing top attack an enemy base, you dont need the long sustained flight of a jetpack so you opt to where a much quicker variant, a sleeker and faster jumpack for short bursts of flight and a slow descent. You dont need the agility provided by your current light armor so you wear a heavier however slower armor to allow you to take the front.
This would both give your character identity with it's look but also provide a tactical advantage provided by it. It would also encourage player driven corporations to manufacture and sell these armors to other players creating an ingame social and economy improvement. This would also make corporation factions a valuable asset to military factions.
The only downside save for the time it would require the programmers and artist to make this, is the fact that this would give new players a slightly greater disadvantage considering they have neither a ship nor decent armor. To help remedy this slightly, i would say that your armor can be stolen from your body when dead, however this is not a perfect solution.
Thoughts?