What about in FRED?
The wireframe thing? I was going to wait until I had tried that myself before commenting. There was an issue previously where wireframe mode was/is still non-HTL and was hitting a limit on some of the higher-poly models. I think that FRED2 may use HTL-based line drawing for that but I'm not sure. Either way, I had fixed it so that it shouldn't crash with rendering hi-poly models in wireframe view and instead it just wouldn't render. That worked in the normal game but I had never tried it in FRED2. FRED may do something different, or this is a new and unrelated issue. I'm still working on getting the dynamic starfield code working in FRED properly so I'll test out the wireframe thing as I put the finishing touches on the starfield code.
Oh yeah, it happens a lot.
the limit is 6500 normals.
It dumps a warninr when loading a mission with a leviathan/fenris, saying that there are too many normals, then it sez that i there are 40 normals, capped to 0, and opens the misiion.
However, if a larger, more detailed ship is allso in the mission, it gives the warning message about too many normals and chrashes

and I think it did that alls owhen i turned on hte model display, not only in the wireframe. the only safe way to make missions is by havinh the view set to show only dots
