Blurred textures and my own bad memory

Hi.

Spurred by a thread in the FS9 forum, I've come here in the hope that someone can help my memory. The thread concerns permanent (for a certain value of permanent) blurry ground textures but I'm curious about blurred aircraft textures.

Not knowing anything about painting or designing aircraft, I may well use the wrong words but I recall learning some years ago that a problem in mapping an incorrectly sized texture to part of an aircraft can cause that part of the aircraft's paint to blur.

(or possibly incorrectly mip mapped, or saved in the wrong format, or, or...)

It's an effect I have seen (tail logo/flag on Just Flight's C-130K comes to mind but elsewhere too) and, as I recall, zooming right in and out sharpened the texture again. I'm not sure because the texture doesn't always blur, rather as though it's triggered by something else like an AI plane or scenery object.

If anyone here still models and paints for FS9, do you know what I'm writing about (because I surely don't...) and can you explain it to me in baby language please?

D