@Zyreal: Yes, there are. However, this heavily depends on the power of the computers that people are playing it on. As a comparison though, here are my specs:
with that, i was able to get an FPS of about 70-80 with 1 million polys on the screen at once. it started going below 50 to around 40 when i hit 1.15 million polys. So, seeing as there are rarely more then 5 or so capships on screen at once, you could easiely give them polycounts of 30k or more. We'll also be using progressive LOD that will lower the polycounts of models as they get farther away dynamically (meaning no extra work for modellers). Since there are a lot of factors, these numbers could change, but its obvious that the number of polys in a freelancer ship is maybe a tenth of the polys in an Openlancer ship.
Openlancer also supports normalmapping, which further allows for more detail.
@BestFlyerHere: Ironically, the thing i'm most concerned about is if it'll run on windows XP properly. So far it has, but you never know.
@Commodore: Unless you know how to program in C++, the program is useless to you.