Ok, it's working slowly. First attempt the wingtips were blank and alot of seams everywhere. I've been slowly deleting poly and fixing it. I still have flickering on the mesh on the leading wing edges, bow, and dorsal plating. it's very very slow guesswork on what is the right peice to delete.
Almost there. Seems to still be some flicker but I dunno if it will show in the BC port..134 materials..I think I'll mess with it tomarrow some more and try one more port. Given the massive ammout of tedious work, this will be the only one. I may do the warbird. but this is just too much. Once I use the material editor to discover the mesh chunk has no texture (or not) the undo no longer works, so if I guessed wrong it's go back to the last save because I'll never get that part back exactly where it should be manually, without "undo move". Myabe I dunno what I am doing and there is another way to remove what appears to be extra mesh parts but I am not familiar with it. I wish the person intending to convert these had come through.