Regarding the fighter bay. Add $fighterbay in special from inside either PCS or Model view. Model view gives you the opportunity to view your entries as you type them in.
Remember to ad radius and position, and this should be straightforward.
Regarding the clipping. Bad polygon. FS2 is not happy with Curved polygons or better, curved surfaces. Now Truespace and 3dmax supports curved surfaces. And only recently new games support curved surfaces. This means if you have a curved and you look at it from some angles, then the engine of the game will not be able to project the texture correct on the surface. Meaning that it will not project anything and thereby it goes "transparent"
Make sure all your polygons / faces have 3 points max. This is the best way of getting rid of clippings, as it gets rid of any unknown bending.
Volition used 3d max to create the models and 3dmax triangulates any models.
The terminology in max is however different from the terminology in truespace regarding what is a face.
A face in truespace is a surface consisting any number of points
A cube for example has 6 faces each consisting of 4 points.
But a cube in 3dmax has 12 faces. A face in max is a triangle that has no more than 3 points.
So max creates a 4 point surface by joining two faces where these faces shares two vertex’s.
In English: So we join two triangles to form a square.
This is the way the Freespace 2 engine expects two see and project models. So in essence this is way you manually have to do in Truespace in order to avoid clipping.
3dmax triangulation is the main reason why shields have to be triangulated. The shield meshes where built by using 3dmax so naturally the engine where designed to read them as triangulated.
And this goes for ship models too.
