Ok i added engines and a few things that helped make it spacey. give your thoughts plz.

"The Solar Sail Demonstrator will launch on a Falcon 9 in 2015". Okay so now you've shamed us all with your concrete logic, leave.

As for the updated ship, it still looks nice but doesn't really seem much 'spacier' to me. I can't really think of any suggestions except shifting those masts to each side of the ship (sort of like two versions of the ship stuck keel to keel). It just doesn't fit with all the other (extremely flat) ships in SS.

It looks like it's an insane amount of polys. Like 6-8k? It's hard to tell.

its only 11234 polys

Is that triangles, or just rectangle poly count?

sorry this is the right one.

Yeah... That's a shitton of polys. All of the "4 vertex" polys are actually 2 polys because they get converted into triangles on .obj export. That's like 20k+

Dreadnoughts are less than half of that.

Could probably do with a lot fewer polys on the sails without compromising the look.

its a demonstrator and in 2015, oh wait it isnt 2015 yet? sorry, i must of missed it since we just entered 2014

They do not get converted to triangles whwn exported to .obj... and ss can handle atleast 25 of these in sol with no lag

I think this depends on the exporter, but either way irrlicht doesn't like 4 point polys (I had lighting bugs from a mesh using 4 point polys).

They should be converted on export, but if they aren't, the engine still renders them as triangles and performs calculations as if they were triangles. It isn't about what "seems to work" or what "seems fine", it's about being efficient with the resources you have. You can accomplish almost the exact same look with a tenth of the polys.

What happens 6 months from now when all the new content is 20k+ polys per model and people with high end systems start lagging like crazy because there are inefficient models everywhere all the time? What about systems now that can barely get 30fps on low? What about multi-clienting?

You have to be smart about it and make as small of an impact as possible while still making it look badass.

The sails could be like 100 polys each and still look really nice. The engine parts could be slimmed way down, the hull could be slimmed way down, the deck, the front, all of it could be a lot more simple while still retaining the look 100%. It would look a lot cleaner, too and it would be a lot easier to manage. It also makes it easier to texture when your UVs are a lot bigger. It's not as much of a pain in the ass to setup the UV map in a good layout.

It's a really cool looking ship, but it's absolutely not suitable for a game asset at 20k+ polys. I don't even think some EVE battleships or carriers clock in at near that many polys. Hell, i'd be surprised if Titans were even 20k honestly, or even stations.

I think your (crazyhorse) problem might be that you don't know how to do the texturing parts as well as Biggee does, which is where a lot of details come from, not the model. A great example of this is this image from Wikipedia on normal mapping (and yes, the SS client can use normal map and specular maps):

First off, if you want ss to be efficient then like 90% of ss's models need to remade or fixed, because most of the models in the game have parts just thrown in and not connected, with seams like it would not be a problem, but in the long run it is. the only time you should had stuff unconnected is if it is moving. Every one of my models are 100% connected, unless the part is ment to move.
Yes I put over detail on models because I can not texture wreath shit, to i make up for that in the model. Also note that this model is from that I have done for a competition so there are more polys because of that reason.