Hey, I'm working on a large scale space game… I have three real options that stand out
Fighters with a medium poly count and cell shading
Fighters with a low poly count and textures
Fighters with low poly count and cell shading
I want to know what kind of speeds I could be looking at… are we talking 5 FPS with 10 fighters (poly count say 90) flying around?
The third option would give me the best frame rate but I don't know which of the other two is better. I would love to have a high frame rate with high poly counts and good textures but I'm not sure that is going to be possible after I saw my frame rate dip from 400 to 50 with three shapes and a skybox.
I've just become acquainted with jMonkey so I'm not really sure how everything is going to work out yet. I've seen the vanishing point in the tutorials and I'll hope to keep the fighters rendered until they are 1-3 pixels big. The vanishing point does depend on the size of the object… right? If you are flying towards a capital ship you may not have enough time to stop by the time you see it…
Oh, if there is a simple way to boost the resolution of the skybox rendered images I would love to know… I tried scooting the box back but it had no effect (probably because I'm in simple game)
Thanks and sorry for all of my noob questions. 
You must be the tenth person here starting a large scale spacegame here (if only you all could work together!)
Anyway, shading, triangle count, and texture sizes all "max out" different parts of your videocard… modern cards are usually extremely good at shading though, so medium poly models with shading would probably get the highest FPS.
"10 fighters (poly count say 90)" doesn't sound like much (a "poly" isn't a really good measure though)… in any case even older cards can render scenes with millions of triangles at decent FPS.
You must be the tenth person here starting a large scale spacegame
From as long as I can remember lurking here, everyone jokes that there are 139805 space games in development. But I can only think of two, and not a single one that has been shown off to any significant degree :?
That's kinda self contradicting… cause we only make that joke everytime someoone annouces they're starting another space game!
If someone actually finished one, you won't hear any jokes I think… we'll all be playing it…
Thanks
Unfortunately (fortunately?) I'm an astrophysics major in college so I only have a few hours on weekends to devote 
Someday I should finish…
Is there an easy way to convert a panorama into a skybox? I know how to split it in 4 with photoshop but I don't know how to distort the top and bottom so that it accounts for the square shape…
The principles of the skybox are not unique to jME, googling skybox should give some results. Or maybe you could make a post in the effects forum. Using a skydome is also an option.
By panorama you mean a skydome texture? In that case, you can just apply your panorama texture to a dome primitive. However in certain cases there's artifacts on the top of the dome due to space distortion as the texture concentrates into one point. Converting into a skybox allows you to remove those distortions.
Here's a tutorial on how to convert a dome into a skybox: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Build_a_skybox
Hmmm… textured ships are working but I can't get cell shaded ships to work… in general, do you have to alter the code to go between the two? I combined the maggie tutorial with one of the milkwriteto ones to get the capacity to get textured models in… but I keep getting a reflection error or something from the sun in basic game when I try to load a shaded model. If I fiddle with the output from wings i can get it to run sometimes but the model isn't displayed. I'm using .obj if that helps… thanks.
Never did much with cell shading… maybe for cell shading different lighting settings are used? Make sure to pay close attention to that in the cell shading test…
There's different ways to do it though (cell shading)… maybe other people are using better methods even. Might be worth a topic of it's own…