Originally posted by mikhael
HOOOOO-Boy...
Edrick, you went fruity with the geometry.
999 vertices and well over a thousand polys. I'm going to be ripping vertices out of this thing with a claw hammer...
Too much use of Wings3D's smooth function.

That caused a lot of the screwy geometry (and the ragged edges on the wings) as Wings3D lets you make non-planer faces and accepts them within limits. I don't think FS2 likes them but I don't have any easy way to tell where the bad geometry is as it crashes FRED2. (As you saw from my pics it looks alright in Wings3D.)
I could have tried to fix each one individually, but changing one (using the function that makes a non-planer face planer) could screw up other faces in the process.
My newer models shouldn't suffer the same problems. I'm limiting my use of smooth now. Will try to save any smoothing for the last step of the main mesh, and only after I've checked the non-smooth version in FRED2/FS2.
The ship also started out as a project to make a very different looking ship and went through some major changes. (Note the mess at the front of the neck that resulted from trying to add the "shuttle" control center which was made as a seperate object. Different sections with different divisions.)
Now I think it's about time I hull tested my cool looking AWACs, working title: The GTA Hope. :>