How to programmatically change colors of part of a sprite....shaders??

I have a space game that I am working on for mobile. The object of the game is to go through the different warp gates which will add to your score. Upon going through each gate, the player will change to the color of that gate. The base color of the ship is white but the embellishments of the ship are colored. Please see the image below: alt text

I as you can see I have multiple colors for the gate. I realized that I would love to just animate one of the gates and one ship and have the colors switch programmatically at runtime. Is there a way that I can target just the colored portions of the sprite and change based on chosen colors? I am not too familiar with shaders, but if they are involved, I would love for somebody to point me in the right direction.

Thanks in advance!

Here’s an old example to get you going from Unity’s Forums:

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/best-easiest-way-to-change-color-of-certain-pixels-in-a-single-sprite.223030/