Here's a comparison shot I made for scaling. As you can clearly see, the middle model is a rip from STO. I try not to rely on rips for reference (I didn't use one for the Exeter) but I nabbed it just to show a little something...
The ripped model was around 10k tri's. I say "was" because by just messing with the saucer, I was able to remove a good
five thousand triangles. STO models have a different way of smoothing than what we do with BC ones. STO's meshes all use only one smoothing group. At areas that need hard edges, like the rim of a Sovereign-like saucer, there are actually entire bunches of minuscule polygons that make it appear sharp. Without these micro-polies, the entire mesh would look like a blob, but with them the poly count is excessively high for a relatively low quality mesh.
Basically, a rip is nearly useless for BC without heavy modification. And assuming all these useless polies are removed and the smoothing groups are remade, you come out with a mesh of five thousand triangles or less, definitely on the lower end of current BC standards.
