yeah, that's kinda what I was shooting for.
as for polycount, it varies. I've always worked to use the least polys I can get away with on the main hull, so I have more budget for fiddly greebly bitz- but with modding stuff, I tend to use a lot of kitbashing since it's a relatively 'easy' way to stick to a theme. so most of the stuff posted here is an odd blend of my fairly basic minimal-polys style and X3's "Poly budget? what's that?" insanity.
... protip: if your first LoD reduction turns the ship into a vaguely ship-shaped blob, you have too many polys.
(seriously X3's LoDs are painful because while the full lods are fairly nice (if somewhat repetitive given their insistence that a couple of tapers and stretches with a couple different greebly bits are sufficient for making an entirely different class of ship, arrrrgh!) the moment you zoom out they dissolve into barely-recognizable blobs. it's sad... and it makes the video enhancement goggle's zoom function effectively useless, since aforementioned model recycling makes distance visual identification an absolute bear.
and then there's things that make me go "WHY" like a tank model with exquisitely modeled tread geometry and a barrel that's made of like ten polygons total WHY