hmmmm... you talk a lot about the poly count drawing too much mem, but here's what I think:
What really may slow the game are textures. Why?
Take starlancer for instance: a fighter there has 1200 polys!! Darn too much for FS, but in Starlancer in my old 800 MHZ with an ATI Rage 2, the last mission (where you have lots of caps and fighters - BOE mission
) works just fine, while in FS the mission of the Colossus vs Repulse, when the Colossus jumps, the game slows down... I think this is mainly because in Starlancer trhey change a ships textures when it is a BIT far away to a lower resolution, and don't use lods... while in FS the game only changes LOD's and textures, when the ship is pretty far away (of course, that can be changed in the .tbl file...)... So the big probs with slowing downs are the textures, not the models. Am I right??
So what we need to do first is find a better way of texture changing before doing anymore tweaks in the graphical engine...
I say NO to LODs (not the debris, of course...), but yes to better texture changing only...