Uh, well I don't think I've tried it in game as it was a fresh install for my campaign and I didn't play through the FS2 campaign. I loaded it right from the sparky vp btw.
Sometimes I can get it if I open another model first, but then there's like a box around it and I just get the image, not the information about it (like subsystems, detail levels, etcetera).
I noticed something similar the other day, when I opened up LM2's Chaos.VP to look at the NTD Liberty and I loaded it, got an error message though it still displayed the model . . . BUT, I could see like black lines through the textures of the wireframe on the opposite side of the ship. T'was odd.
Actually the only reason I ask is that I want a picture of the Comm Node against a black background for my webpage, so if someone can send something like that over that'd be cool too
(with a 800xwhatever file size too so I can shrink it down and it won't look like crud)