Pioneer dev forum

Okay, this may be a bit controversial because I don't know how much it would fit into the game. (By the way, it is huge.)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nqx6qeagfqlng ... blend?dl=0

A hexagonal solar power collector/beamer for power hungry colonies. There will be tiny thrusters at the panel-strut connection nodes (on the bottom side) for stationkeeping. Rotational correction can also be provided by gigantic magnetorquers in them.

What will it add to the game? Hmm... Atmosphere! New missions involving power stations maybe.
Docking ports? Not sure. I don't think so.

Images:
https://imgur.com/a/wAINmZy

Orbitting I assume?

Yes

To give actual value to the game, some kind of maintainance docking port plus functionality for it would nice. Could have mission to pick up stranded personell there, or meet spy there, or what ever.

Nice idea!
I'd kinda think that it should be waaay bigger, if it's supposed to provide beamed power. Like the scale of the medium orbiter, or even bigger.
I mean the scale of the individual panels are good in my opinion, but there should be way more of them. Possibly multiple versions, so an up-start colony has a 3km diameter, but a larger one could have lots of 20-is km diameter ones.
Unleash your inner megalomaniac :D

I think they should be scripted so they are always at equatorial GEO of any given planet, and it would be rather nice if they would alwas face the sun. But that's not the modeling side of things.

When I add one more layer of panels, it becomes this big:
https://imgur.com/a/iF5Qu7y

Unfortunately, I think the struts I am using are quite tri-heavy and I've already reached 191k tris with no details involving the panels or... well, anything at all.

Yeah, the struts can be problematic.
I guess it would work better, if there would be a way to LoD each module separately, so you could make a textured triangle rod for struts afar, and only show the modeled ones up close.
I think you could still go larger.

Variety of sizes is good, I like the larger one too.

To avoid the polygon count explosion try using tubes instead of trusses. If you want more detail, that looks like complex trusses that are too tight to fit a ship into, then you can texture them.

Oh and as for the polygon count, honestly these days I have no idea. You're only going to see one of these at a time and it'll be a few draw calls at most. I did a test using a star destroyer about... 8 or 9 years ago. That thing had over 5 million triangles and still ran at over 60 fps up close.

That was long before I started doing any optimisations to the engine so who knows what we could render nowadays.

Yeah, tubes could be the easy way to go.