was the stuff in that old '06 release of nukemod made in TS?
yeah there's some cool stuff in there. shame none of it has proper smoothing 
Truespace forever fails as a modelling program cause it donno how to smoothgroups/edgesplit D:
it had the best smoothing of the day, this was before pcs2 was churning out perfectly smoothed models. you had 2 import options: *.scn and *.cob (i never used cob, it always screwed up hierarchy). there was no other format supported. most people then were doing weird things to get their models into a cob or scn format. going through a hodgepodge of formats and format converters to get a cob/scn out of their input formats. the results were bad geometry, bad smoothing, and a ****ton of other glitches. of course then the max plugin came around and while this made perfect smoothing it was full of collision holes. and finally collada support finally allowed for good import from max, so that smoothgroups could be maintained. the good smoothing you have now is entirely a product of the steady improvement of mod tools. lets see you make a perfectly smoothed model with '06 tools, **** just be glad you didnt have to make a mod with 1999/2000 tools. you kids are spoiled!
granted truespace follows the wrong modelling paradigm for the kind of meshes freespace uses. truespace was intended for primitive modeling, not meshing. max is by far better at meshing. why cob/scn was chosen over other formats of the time was beyond me. perhaps it was because truespace cost a lot less than max, perhaps it was because it was a program the early devs had access too. it sure as hell wasnt chosen for its smooth grouping capabilities. there weren't many (if not any) open source model formats at the time that we could rely on, and some proprietary format had to ultimately be used. but it was the lesser of two evils at the time to forsake perfect smoothing in favor of a program that could write better cob/scn files, as opposed to convert from format a to format b to format c to cob to pof, which led to a number of bad geometry issues. put simply, i blame kazan.
i did learn later on that there were some ways to get good smoothing in ts, you could use multiple materials to create seams in the smoothing (they also aid in making selections for uv mapping), this can be seen on the ragnarok class. you could also tweak smoothing factors on a per material basis to get rid of uglies, use enough of them and you can get smoothgroup equivalent quality. and didnt apply maps until just before export. of course by the time i figured this out i had moved to max (this was when the max plugin came out).
