Fine, so you can plug in hundreds of thousands of polygons into BC's engine, even on a mid-range PC. (Which is what, these days, exactly?)
I had a conversation with Cord, who has managed to get as many as 800k into the game... a highly unstable game.
I did not claim to know everything, I claimed to have some intellectual authority. There are plenty of reasons why any good modeler in BC is economical about polygon use...
1. High numbers of polygons have been shown to make the game unstable.
2. Ships do not damage properly when they start having many tens of thousands, and then hundreds of thousands of polygons.
3. A lot of people out there still use older PC's, probably many more than we think. They should be able to enjoy the game too.
4. Due to the nature of BC's lighting rig, objects with too many edges look strange under direct light and weapons glow because the brightness goes through the mesh. There are no true shadows. An object in BC will almost always look better flat and smooth with a convincing set of textures.
5. Due to the nature of BC's camera, you can not get very close to a ship without the mesh starting to disappear. This means that using an excessive number of polygons, particularly in small areas on on small pieces of the mesh, is wasteful of system resources.
6. Making one ship tens of thousands of polygons quickly begins to add up if people want to play large battles. All of a sudden, all those mid range and older rigs out there start becoming exponentially more unstable.
7. Conversion can become vastly more complex and bug-ridden.
8. There is a much higher possibility that mesh errors such as broken edges and double-sided faces will escape the builder's attention and affect the mesh negatively. (In qualitative and technical respects, as well as in-game visual quality and stability.) To illustrate, if the average model is 97% error free, a mesh of 100k polys is going to have significantly more errors than a mesh of 10k.
9. High poly meshes are almost never a single-unified mesh, which BC prefers for damaging purposes. Also, a clean and unitary mesh is, without recourse, the mark of a skilled artist.
Now, here is why I am arguing this point so fervently against you limey. You've got an eye for ships, no doubt, but you could build your ships using a quarter to a half of the polygons that you do and achieve the same visual quality that you strive for. I know this because I've looked at your meshes. Wiley sent me his Excelsior a couple of weeks ago, which he was proudly (*and rightly so) touting as high poly. It's a beautiful piece of work, and many times, the community will get excited if you simply say something is high-poly. However, Wiley, who is growing and learning very quickly, was able to remove 20,000 polygons from his 40,000 polygon mesh with, and I stress this, zero degradation in the the visual quality of his mesh. So I see it this way: A mesh that is twice as economical with no visual degradation is a good trade off. Your Nova mesh, for example, could easily have the same thing done to it, and lose none of it's obvious visual quality.
I'm not saying all this to piss you or anyone off. I say all this because I've been around here for a while, I do know what I'm doing, and I see it as a responsibility of mine to ensure that new and young modders who come into this community are given some support and education when and where it is appropriate. The fact is that, despite some of the great things going on in this community, it has never been slower, and it is slowing down. If we allow ourselves to simply overlook a cornerstone of good mesh production, the overall quality of the products that come from this community will have diminished which has in other communities most certainly been a death knell.
In conclusion, I am not 100% opposed to a 50k mesh. Honestly, I am not. However, if we are going to be pushing boundaries in this community (which I am for), we must be sure that we are pushing the boundary for the right reason. We must be sure that a mesh that's 50k polygons NEEDS every single last one of its triangles, and that we are not making a mesh "high-poly" just for the sake of making it so, or "exciting" the community at large, who in my experience, knows virtually nothing about anything that we do here.
I am not an advocate for low polygon meshes. I am an advocate for good ones.