Finally, with some serious faffing about I have succeeded in getting this to appear correctly.
It's been a struggle - despite the excellent pointers from the members here. It is, perhaps an area worth having a dummies guide/step by step walk-through. The above mentioned correlation between val files and those ids in the dat files is elementary to me NOW but a couple of weeks ago was like staring into a cave!
I need to hone my approach by tweaking to get wakes and particles correct (for example) but I feel I have come through the worst of it the better for it. Now I can work on getting my other ship models into the engine for further testing under fire.
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