BigBangTheory still posts sometimes.
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I tend to check the forums every week for some updates on either the core game development/patch or work the modding community produces essentially to see if any of the major issues have been addressed.
What I see is modders working hard with what little they can do and that little to no progress has been made on the bigger stuff as its all locked inside the core engine.
The highest poly models in game are the structures at between 4000 to 7000 tri's. Generally for an RTS, or a game with lots of models on the map at once you want to keep the counts as low as possible. Those counts above are just an average. Give or take depending on the faction. I try to keep my models under 5k.
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This is applicable to game instances where you expect a fairly high number of ships, SoaSE can support much higher poly count models naturally you will reach the limit much sooner on that basis. Quality vs. Quantity... The most I have had in game is five x 40,000 poly ships + the usual vanilla SoaSE ships. My understanding of the game engine is that Level-of-Detail (LOD) is not supported yet which means in theory you use the same ammount of resources to represent a highly detailed model even when you are not viewing it directly. If someone knows better please explain I'm not an expert...
How do you make ships and the like?
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1) Aquire a 3D modelling application
2) Learn how to use 3D modelling application
3) Learn how to create and apply textures and maps
4) Create your ship
5) Add flair points, dummy points
6) Create or modify particle system effects
7) Add the ship into the game
As you do more you learn more and will become better and faster at most of the tasks at hand.
The Advent and the Minbari are so similar, I couldn't resist. So I think maybe modders intersted coulstart modding some Minbari ships.
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Minbari ships are better suited to the game engine, you need to be aware that to get something like a Sharlin in game could take 50 - 100 hours of work. So its quite a big ask before you've even considered 'what is the Sharlin going to fight' and more to the point 'what is the future for SoaSE'?
To answer the early message, the single biggest problem for me is not being able to get the game to do what I want it to do and it frustrates the hell out of me to see other game produced many years before SoaSE have no trouble in these areas. So you can't use the advantages and advances in SoaSE to develop a better more evolved mod and for me that was the whole motivation in the first place.
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(which is another problem). There is a home made tool for 3dsMAX but its bugged though it does have the advantage of being able to import models from the game.