You must not think there is a face count limit for weapons in blockland
how many are there in that model?
There is no limit. The engine can load just about as many triangles as I want it to.
Ive tested this statement with a 50k+ model.
The one you see here is ~6000 triangles. I don't care what you nor anyone else thinks of it. It looks just fine alongside the rest of the game to me, and I have no slowdown issues.
And what you just said about the Zapper:
High-poly =/////= smooth shading.
As far as I know the Zapper doesn't use very many polygons, its just smoothed. If I'm wrong, then it must have been coincidence, as Ive downloaded this model before with no speed issues.
Another possibility is that it uses textures that are of too high-resolution.
It could also be that the bandwidth on this game's server(s?) is very restricted.