all models are triangulated durring load, and non flat faces will be fixed there, it actualy would be sort of a good idea to have non flat faces, as this would be a smaller file and load quicker (though the amount by wich it does so would probly be insignifigant)
and unless there are a lot of people who need this raised I'd rather not as it would raise the memory requirements (for storing the actual segments of the ship, not the textures) and there will be a considerable slow down for ships that have too many textures (note, there is a monsterus (were talking 80 foot radioactive reptile here) slowdown in the old rendering code as every poly gets drawen individualy and the texture gets changed every other poly)
but then again, most people's models won't need to be optomised to that level, under no situation will you ever have a model that renders slower in the HT&L engine than the old engine, saying there will be a slowdown is a bit miss leading, it's more like you'd have just slightly less of a speed up
also if you don't want to remake you're old models for this, that's fine thely just render an order of magnatude faster than they used to
