As promised, some renders of the first ship I did.

A lot of hours went into it, as I had to learn everything in 3dsMax that has to do with modeling and texturing and I'm not easily pleased.

Also thanks to Iceman for his infinite patience with my questions, and SolCommand for his tutorial about mapping.

I made 4 textures for this ship - a Civilian, Admin, Server Police and Clan one. I will only show the civilian one at this time, since I moved my folders around and have to re-assign all the materials in Max first. The other had colors, I deliberately went for a 'used' white for this version.
It still has some flaws, but hey it's my first:

Reminds me of something out of the old game Firefight, design wise, that is.

Very nice, those engines are badass!

Thanks for the kind replies all.
Yes, it is my first ship. The cool thing about it that I did everything on it from scratch, from model to in-game. The downside of that is that a lot of time went into it to get it right, far more than should be spent on it, I think. Especially the textures. Being the perfectionist that I am, I redid the textures on all the versions until I was really satisfied. It still is not 100% (for example the green specks inside the exhaust nozzles) but because the engine effects will cover that up, you don't see it in game. And you gotta draw a line somewhere right?

Some data for you guys on to comment on (please do give feedback and be critical):
This model has close to 10.000 poly's, which in hindsight is proof of me trying to get it too perfect and smoothening it out too much. Most modelers will confirm that you don't need lots of poly's to make a model look good. And the lower the polycount, the easier it is to render the model in game. So I could have done with half of them, or even less. Freelancer has its own way of smoothening out a model anyway.
Been a bit too eager to get it right I guess.

The model consists of 9 groups, each with its own texture. The texture on the main hull section (the 'used white' area) is the biggest with a resolution of 2048x2048. The total size of the texture is 4.87Mb. The ship also has a glow-/light map which makes the light yellow parts look really sweet, but it adds another +/- 4Mb to it. In total the mat file is just under 10 Mb. Which is a bit on the large side I think, and I will definitely go smaller next time. Only increases the total size of the mod file.
Although I'm not very confident that you can get the same amount of detailing and image quality on a texture of for example 512x512. I've tried it, and although people told me I would never be able to see the difference, I clearly did. And I didn't like it.

I updated the first post with some decent renders.
I'll post some renders of the other versions shortly. Need to sort out a few things first.

Thank you very much for your helpful reply. And I don't mind you rambling on, I do that myself lol.

It was quite some months ago when I made this model. When it was done (and during the dev process), I discussed it with some of the people in the Mod Team I was in at that time, and they came up with exactly the same suggestions as you did.
I cut down on the number of faces exactly in those areas which you highlighted as best as I could, and managed to get it down quite a bit. The end result is this model with still about 10.000 faces.
The main cause for the high poly count is the wings, they are smoothened like mad and make up for a good part of the total poly count. Tweaking it more though, will be a pain-staking job. And since I already put so much time into it, I decided to declare this one 'done' and have it serve as a reminder of 'my first ship' and what I have learned from that. Like you said it's so much easier to keep the face count in mind during the modeling process, than to have to do it afterwards on an already finished model.
It have tested this model in game thoroughly though, and it doesn't give any problems what so ever, even when using a low-end computer and with several of these ship models on the screen.

Purely as an experiment to see if I could make a ship with a very low poly count, but that still looked smooth in game, I made another ship after this. Here's a render:




Don't mind the white haze please, still have that problem with the Gamma&LUT settings in Max.
This ship only has around 300 faces, and consists of 2 groups - the red and the white part. I have put it in game and even though it looks crap on these images, I was surprised of how good a job the game did smoothening out the model itself. Looked pretty decent actually.
The texture on this ship is just so there was something on it, to look and see how the ship would look in game with a simple texture on it. So you could make it look even better with a decent texture.

I keep both these models as examples of the two ends of the scale - high and low face count. And it's clear that even though the difference in face count between the two is huge, the difference in how they look in game is extremely small, if there is any.

that´s really nice! i would like to see it flying