Quick peak, models should be of the following sizes:
One topic to pay attention to: Please stop overlapping islands in UV unwrapsRough guideline:
- Fighter: 15k triangles
- Corvette: 30k tris
- Cruiserer: 60k
- Carrier: 120k
- Space station: 250k
Wiki page on shaders: HowTo:IntroToShaders
Texturing Wiki: HowTo:SuperrealisticTexturing
Agood tutorial at the parallel universe forums: After modeling a ship... What to do?
There's actually a lot of good material over at the wcjunction forums: http://wcjunction.com/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=49
A note about any wiki links you find on the forums here. There are more than likely out of date. With the move all wiki links should point to http://wiki.vega-strike.org and not http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/
If anyone finds a useful thread give a little detail and post a link here. Any questions, see THIS thread and someone should be able to provide an answer.