ah right, thanks didnt realise it would be a major issuse on the ram limit though, its the sci fi at war mod for EAW and thres in the region of 10 different faction all having different models and textures, your talking 200+ different models just for ships let alone strcutures so its going to be a bit of an isssue isnt it reaistically. 

I thought the ram limit was going away even though the cpu core limit was staying

The RAM limit is still there its just that Sins does a better job at managing its RAM usage. Adding too many races will goof this up.

The difference is as Kitkun says. Sins loads everything. The upside is no need for loading screens aside from the first one. Downside is that its very memory intensive.

Yes,

You just have one model and several entity files connected to it.

Hmm...so in laymen's terms, the components must be grouped as a model for each ship and can't be called seperately from anywhere else?

You can have different ship meshes. That is not so much of a ram issue. The main thing you have to worry about sharing are the Textures. The textures are the single biggest user of ram in sins.

You can have several different meshes that share the same texture. So you can design for example 4 different ships, but plan on UV mapping them on just one texture sheet. That is just one way to get around the limits. Just like the Starbases, and Structures that upgrade. The all use multiple meshes to represent each upgrade, but all share the same texture.

Or you can think "smaller" and use smaller textures for your ships.

SoA 2 has 5 different factions. Each with 5 different sets of models, and textures. Why it runs without hitting the 2 gig limit (most of the time) is because we used lower resolution textures on the ship models, and we streamlined the particle system so there isnt a different particle for each, and every weapon.