[Aufklärer]

Hi xmac, good model for a first try, nice shape. For il2, I think it has too much unnecessary faces, but it's easy to change. Maybe it's the picture, but it seems you have ~20 facets for one half of the fuselage, with smoothing you could reduce the number of facets to 10/12 and the model would still look perfectly round in game. also on the length, you could reduce the number of frames. For example the straight area between the tail and the rear of the cockpit could be done with only 2/3 sections instead of 5/6.
I don't know much about il2 usual triangle count, but I think for a single engine plane, 6/8000 triangles would be a reasonable balance between detail and game performance. So if you can cut the polycount on "straight" surfaces like fuselage and wings, you can use this gain to detail the more complex surfaces like engine intakes, gun ports, wheel wells, undercariage and all the small bits.
I'm sorry I can't help for the texturing problem, I don't use blender.