IMHO the modders/players should finally get rid of the 'HOW MUCH IS MUCH' poly attitude.
Omni has already prooven that the engine is capable of handling insane ammounts of polies on an average systems when you properly use its features, namely:
- LODing
(the main optimalization for fighter and smaller objects)
- Detail Boxes
Bob developed this for the WCSaga - to model high poly hangars.
It was expanded, and by putting a detail box into another (a method that can be accuratly dubbed 'recursive detail boxing', on can create really high-poly models with a very efficient rendering.
What sets apart a big detail boxed model from a simply LODed one, is that the RCBoxed will only render the portion close-to and in the field of view of the player.
This means the computer only has to wresstle with a portion of the model, therefore the so far unreachable limits can be broken.
By creating a new feature on the model in a DBox - and putting finer details on thesaid submodel into further DBox-es (effectivly RDBoxing) the resulting model will have a very fine detail revelation.