There are several BIG problems in converting KA models:
You need to find a program that can read lightwave scene files .lws not just lightwave object files .lwo. It is hard to find a program that will read .lws files, I do not know of any free ones that can.
KA models are made up of several submodels that are separate objects (.lwo files) combined as a scene (.lws file). The folder with the .lws file (usually named High) contains a subfolder OBJ that has the .lwo files in it. Milkshape can only import 1 .lwo file at a time so you can not get the whole model.
KA textures are kept in a separate folder and do not have descriptive names like fcl1.bmp This makes it very difficult to find the textures needed by a model. KA uses many shared stock textures and many mods only include the textures that are different than stock textures so you have to keep all the stock textures available in case you need them. This means that you have to buy a copy of the game (hard to find and expensive. It uses 6 CD's!
but all of the program files are on disk one,
so if you find an copy for sale that is missing any of the other disks it will do to get the models and textures from.) Then you need to download the Decomplier program to extract the files from the single data file.
KA damage textures do not have a standard format. For example the damage texture for the stock texture 00wbt.bmp is 00wbtd.bmp but the damage texture for the stock texture 00free1.bmp is 00gree1.bmp! So it can be hard to know if you are dealing with a regular and a damage texture or 2 separate textures.
I stopped even trying to convert KA mods because I found that there were already better SFC models available for most of the ships. All most all of the the stock SFC models up to OP are the same as the stock KA models anyway and they have been converted to SFC 3 already.
If you want the challange you can try converting,
but it would be easier to just make your own model, IMHO.