ok heres my dillemma... i spent about 4 hours making a great spaceship(first model i made from scratch too lol). so i saved it as an obj file. and go to bed. i wake up and open it to begin shading it and it takes like 4 mins to load, i am like wtf. it is tiny, i modeled it in a 30x30 box and it didnt fit. now it fits in one square......  but i glance over at the model stat box and now it has almost 236,000 polygons and 471,000 edges....  i know it didnt have that many when i was through modelling it lol. so i have 2 questions really. is there some way i can dial the fidelity down to a sane level, and also, maybe someone can tell me wtf i did wrong in the saving process to have it become tiny but have an enormous ammount of polys etc. thanks in advance!

Simple... the space ship was modeled in Carrara? So you need to save to a Carrara file not others format that is really a conversion. You need to sabe as a CAR file, the native Carrara format.
You can try the tesselation tool to "clean" the mesh... but I dont know if this work in this model now.
Model is pratice, so get back to model it again.

ah i see :(
a tool would be useless as this monstrosity lags the hell out of carrara lol. i was hoping maybe there was a command i might have overlooked to quick fix it. oh well my next one will be better, and hopefully faster. i did learn some tricks doing that one :)
thanks for taking the time to reply

lol i did manage to get it to do a render, was too lagged to do real sky and stuff :p not spectacular but i am a newbie to carrara lol.

Not bad for a first try.  Looks similar to the command hull on my sparrowhawk class cruiser model.  Save in .car format.  I only save as an .obj if I plan on selling it later on or if I am giving it to someone who uses that format natively.