I use it in my mod to call specific custom lod settings when I need them in certain situations. It only should have an effect on the stuff I have created and to my knowledge should not have any use for models that were not specifically created for it. That made me curious a bit.

There is a cascading load order.
That means that nebula, asteroids and encounterparameters always belong to the top of the file since the stuff loaded below requires these entries being in memory at the point of processing.

The order does not matter. Nebula can be above or below Asteroids... you can even mix it. The only important thing to remember is that zones and objects have to be below.

A batch of questions:

Are specular maps seperate?
In the vids you have posted over the the past months you have mostly shown metallic surfaces but also in 1 or 2 (IIRC) there were asteroids which looked like having a shiny surface. I am not entirely sure if that was intentional or just a side effect of the demo.
I think some surfaces better shouldn't be reflective.

How does this translate to interiors of bases?
FL renders them slightly different.

Are adv. texture settings such as detailmaps, glowmaps, animated textures etc still supported?

one thing to mention about windows 10... you need to use the no-cd Freelancer.exe as win10 misses the drivers required for the copy protection of the original game.

.... but... ehmm... if the file is already decrypted... notepad should be sufficient

No.

Why?

Because you can not squeeze a battleship into the Osiris docking bay (and multiple other tiny locations).

biggest issue is the lack up multiplayer