Welcome to the new area for all things 3D, ship creation among them.
This subforum is for discussing concepts, and WiP threads for ships, stations, cockpits, buildings and anything 3D. Please post these here so we can keep the forum more organized and tidy.
Some useful reading:
Modeling, texturing, Graphics design part of our wiki
In it the admittedly WiP visual style guide. And two similar stubs for Kaluri and Mandarava-Csepel.
There are some sketches up for grabs in the Ship sketch thread, and also a discussion on inspiration for them.
The wiki has a long article about the model system, where you set up the looks and animations of the model.
You can also find one for setting up the ship stats. You can also use the ship stat planner addon for Blender, it calculates acceleration, and can even output the result into a file.
Model requirements for Pioneer (quick glance)
There are no set in stone tri count and texture size requirements for the models, because a lot of them depends on size. As a rule of thumb, a medium ship should not go too over 30k triangles on the top LoD. As long as a tiny fighter doesn't have tri count in the ballpark of 100ks, it shouldn't be much concern though, because we don't meet big numbers of ships most of the time. Our ships have varying tri-counts, malabar being the heaviest, excluding stations. The orbitals are quite tri-heavy, and yet to be LoD-ed.
The important thing is to have at least two or three LoD levels.
One mesh can only have one material. This is important for setting up transparent parts for example. Rotations and more importantly scales should be applied (frozen) to avoid glitches. While the game can handle models without UVs, they are mandatory for any ship that's going to get into the game. Because how would they look without textures?
The preferred model format is collada .dae, especially for models that have animation. For static models .obj works too.
Preferred texture size is 2K for medium ships, but that can be bigger for larger ships if neccesary. Spec, glow and pattern textures are usually half-sized.
Preferred image format is .dds, but for testing purposes .png is more than enough.
Have fun creating! :)