Detail boxes my friend. Also it's not really that bad, only 4012 tris. The ISD right now is sitting at 28,878 triangles in total with all the detail. Considering what many other mods are cooking up, especially the BSG ones, that's pretty damn good.
"Oh, but there's only one battlestar, and you'll have to have hundreds of ISDs"
Well, given the engine limitations on number of objects, subobjects, weapons, etc, let's just all stop kidding ourselves. There will be no battles with hundreds of ISDs. The only way we could accomplish that would be by giving each ISD only a couple guns, tile mapping the whole thing with some very low res textures and stripping off nearly all the detail. I think I speak for most of the team and most of our fans when I say that I'd rather see these ships done right. Quality over quantity.