If you want to go on in the timeline, you really should take your time and read all rumours in Freelancer. They provide a lot of material! Like Kishiro working on a ship with jump-drive, as the Osiris already has. ALG fusioning with Krüger Minerals, etc.

I've an idea! If we expand the campaign, it would be cool that Trent would become a starship commander, begin with gunboat class then cruiser/destroyer and finally battleship/dreadnought but he wouldn't be an admiral and will only execute Orilion orders (woops! I didn't know I will do this joke before writing this, that was unwanted ^_^' ).

I have some weapons idea :
We could expand particle weapons, adding proton based weapon like an hydrogen cation canon, electron based weapon that can be called cathodic canon. For the FX the proton canon can use the regular red particle (positiv charge) fx and for electron we can just modify bretonian particle fx and make it bluer (negative charge). As for neutron we can make them exclusively green (neutral charge).

I have ideas about shield :
It will not be any longer energetic but armor types and devices. For electric based weapon we can use lightning rod. For thermal based weaps we can use heat shield. For radioactive weaps, wee can use this .

That's just some thoughts.

Freestalker.fr, variablility in playstyle and team tactics is the primary objective of weapon and shield (not only, of course) stuff, you're right.
If i start to explain these moments right now, i will have to say everything what i write on a concepts, because every part is relative to another one. But be sure they are very close to the things you said. Maybe naming will differ a lot, but it can be replaced of course. Im thinking about to make a google-doc table for everyone who knows better be able to replace a stuff with their own, especially nationality-colored factions/houses. About battleship weapons, and weapons at all, every ship class shall recieve a unique new weapon types (besides common ones of course) - but some of them require a little coding. Scanning will be absoultely must-have, cuz vanilla table of damage blocking is expanded a lot, also, as you say, factions recieve 2 or 3 of 5 primary weapon types, and you cannot know which one will be used against you, same as shields. I've made an extremely cool shield system, where capacity does not equal efficiency at all and it is builded around 2 values - sqrt(cap*reg) and cap/reg, where first one is the real power, and the second one defines shield type and weapon type absorb.

Oh, those are really nice models.

Treewyrm, they actually do not reach poly limit and are about 10-15k.
Also i think that restructuring will allow to organise parts better and do not use same ones several times, and bring logics and possible proper use in dynamic ecenomics system later. Only issue i see is docking, but it is fixable one in possible future. About normal maps - they are cool on a long and mid range, but being close geometry is better a lot and allows to make sub-stuff by using normals on them.
Skotty., ty!

Freelancer handles high resolution meshes just fine. Source: This runs just fine.

We're spawning dozens of ships for NPC events, we've tested with large fleets of ships with polycounts in the 50k+, and it's running fine with all the rendering stuff Freeworlds adds (which is way heavier than even Schmack's thing).

I think you're severely overestimating the cost of pushing some polygons and draw calls.

Treewyrm, i can also confirm that vanilla does well with mass of polys. Another my old vid where you can see ~20k tradelanes and ~50k bases with no draw distance limit https://youtu.be/v7rKWzhJrF0?t=1m18s
FPS is low because of ENB with extremely old radeon 9800 card, being turned off it was common.
Anyway i model trying to optimize and keep topology perfect.