Incidentally I just so happened to create a calculator to output reasonable $Detail distance values for any ship or missile. Manual labor is needed however, as you need to check how large a ship or missile is in PCS2 and type that in to the spreadsheet.
These days we have very detailed models and additional textures we didn't have back in the 90's, such as glow maps, shine maps, normal maps and glow points. I believe each of those are only rendered on LOD0. Aggressive switch from LOD0 to LOD1 is pretty important to reduce rendering workload.
Also note that if you've set your model detail to very high, all tabled detail distances are multiplied by 8. On high by 4, on medium they're same as in tables. On low divided by four, on very low divided by eight. But I don't think anyone uses below medium anymore, so medium is the new low and it might be worth tweaking detail distances so that they don't incur excessive rendering when high and very high model detail setting is used.
To this end I created this spreadsheet calculator. I think it works pretty well across the board. All small ships have lower detail distances than in retail, while large ships have about same or slightly longer distances. I don't think this spreadsheet calculator is perfect and in fact I'd like you try to come up with better ideas for calculating detail distances. Of course no calculator beats visually checking and tweaking these values, if you feel like up to the task.
Spreadsheet I've uploaded includes all FS2 ships, weapons and Shivan secondaries from mediavps. These values are all from retail models, not mediavps. Even Shivan secondaries use values from their retail counterparts. Number lods of course needs to match current version of the model and this is why Cyclops and EMP Advanced are missing detail distances in the spreadsheet, neither currently have lods in FSU SVN. Publicly released mediavps do have lods, so you may want to edit the spreadsheet accordingly.
And if you're wondering about those secondary weapon detail distances, support for it was committed to fs2_open trunk in 6932, so any build since 6932 supports the feature. Antipodes 8 is unfortunately too old. Now, let me quote FUBAR concerning weapon detail distances.
Noticed during testing that calculated high poly weapon LODs distances were too high. Take a 7 meter missile. Calculated LOD distances would be 0, 90, 180, 270 etc. On very high this means you are rendering a full poly missile out to 720 meters where it can barely be seen. So I added the optional $Detail distance: to weapons.
Download link
