It's been 3 years and I don't have any of my files handy, but iirc you can change the root_health_proxy so the collisiongroups no longer leech health from the hull, there is a problem with this though, each component's health is added to the health bar in game, so you could find yourself dead with more than half your health bar still full as you can't tell when your hull has reached critical.

You'll be fine as long as you keep the total HP of your collisiongroups to less than 30% of the hulls HP, over that and your hull armor starts to get a little thin

You have to be carefull when modifying the hitpoints in the CollisionGroups, as they share the overall hitpoints for the ship.
A ship with 10k hitpoints and 4 CollisionGroups with 200 hitpoints each, means that the ships hull only has 9200 hitpoints.
So if you go nuts you could end up with a ship with a tissue paper hull that gets killed with 1 shot.

is it an original Microsoft CD or the budget release version?, are you using vanilla FL or running a mod?

Only the original Microsoft Freelancer.exe will ask you for the CD, as it's only the original disc that has the CD security built into it that the .exe is looking for.

Which means your either using the budget version and are running a mod that uses the original .exe, or your CD is a copy/pirate of the M$ version.

gratz on getting to Admiral LS, I'm still a bit behind you, but then I do have 3 characters on the go

I take it you got your free Federation & Klingon ships for the event that's on atm

My 3 toons are -

Kajada@bejaymac <-- Fed
Bejaymac@bejaymac <-- Fed
Aze'bur@bejaymac <-- Klingon

so if you see me give us a shout

You answered your own question when you started removing the SURs and the crashes stopped.

From my experiences I can say SURs are very touchy, they can lockup/CTD anywhere from launch of the game to the destruction of the ship.

*Scratches Head*

Could someone point me to the part of my post where I belittled BullWinkle & LS's work, cause I sure as hell can't find it. It's the exact opposite, I'm all for the SUR Builder and any other tool that makes it easier to get models into FL.
The problem is that even with a SUR Builder working as ST wants it, the CMP has to have been done right otherwise the SUR wont work, and in my experience that's the part most fail on, either because they hate using Milkshape (too basic for them), or because they have little or no modelling experience (not knowing how to use the CMP exporter properly doesn't help either), that is what my post was about.

Eh! the only SURs I've ever done with the splicer are the ones I did for Gibbon's Galactica 2.0 mod, and a couple of starlancer ones I was working on before my last visit to the loony house, haven't built a SUR since I got out, you never know I might just finish them one day. It's the Exporter for me, 5 years of practise means that only "shrinkwrapped" SURs fail for me, and only because that part of the exporter is F***ed.

Ältere Versionen von Milkshape funktionieren nicht so gut mit Vista & Windows 7, versuchen Sie es mit den neueren Versionen statt.

{Goggle translation )