There is no longer a limit on tbl size. Also it will avoid using up that memory while you are actually in a mission. When it's done parsing the initial startup tbls (all tbms, ships.tbl, wepons.tbl, etc) it releases the memory. When playing a mission, after the mission loads, it releases that memory as well so that you aren't wasting anything that could otherwise be used by textures/sounds/etc. Even when it is parsing it will only use as much memory as it actually needs.
This is all recent btw, the previous limit was a little less than 1meg and is still used for parsing while in FRED2. But since that's only for FRED2 we can bump that limit quite easily now and not have to worry about wasting it for the regular game. There are no longer parsing text arrays of a fixed size in FRED2, but FRED2 can't easily be made to use a dynamic limit so the memory for parsing is still allocated at a fixed size when it's needed. The regular game itself no longer suffers from any tbl size limit other than available system RAM.
