Discovered you need to set "anisotropic" to on, then reimport the texture with the reimport button to get it to actually render sharp.  The anisotropic toggle doesn't work on previously imported textures.  Without it, all textures look near sighted.

An experiment revealed there's no way to model RUDs without the rigid body physics engine, assigning rigid bodies to all 102 windows.  The RUD model would have to be swapped in for just animating RUDs.

No materials have matched the brushed metal & wet paint concepts.  The state of free assets is just as bad as it was 20 years ago.  There's no library of materials in godot to apply.  Did another major remodeling to streamline the wings & try to fix normals.

Much tweeking of normals in blender revealed the normals weren't being imported properly.  It might require debugging the godot source code again.

The worst lighting in blender still made it look better than Godot.

It became clear that making a game still takes thousands of hours of tweeking obscure 3D parameters & hand programming shaders to get barely useful results.  Godot doesn't do anything but display some of the obscure parameters in a GUI.  Videos of kids brushing photo realistic trees on a map in Unity don't show the real story.

Watching the Manley Scott review space games reveals just how awful the gameplay is in this genre.  The graphics of other games are all better than the BFR idea.  

There's a small number of gootubers who are more interested in the simpler, dead end games of the 1980's than than complex, neverending games of today.  Lions were never truly addicted to the simple games of the past, but find a game can be quite addictive if there's always attainable forward progress in the campaign & no backtracking when you screw up.  It takes a very large campaign.