Model editing possible ?

:)Hi there alltogether – the few, who stick to REALISTIC spacef(l)ight:D

I’ve been around a lot of space sims, always looking for something realistic in spaceflying and atmospheric in gameplay. And something that can be continued somehow after finishing the purchased storyline, mean that can be modded and added to.
After looking around the most active communities, Freelancer and ,bursting by activity, FreeSpace 2, I rediscovered my old EOC-discs and was ashamed by my flying abilities, brought down by the too-easy-to-fly game engines mentioned above.

But these games have a big advantage: it’damned easy to start changing things by yourself: editing weapons and ships to your taste, even creating compltely new ones and getting them into game as an addition, retexturing, remoddeling hardware, making new mission and even complete campaigns with cutscenes (rearranged) and briefings… and so on.
This is seems mostly due to BIG communities, which created not only mission- and campaignmods, ship- and weaponmods the dozens to count, all of this rearrangeable into numberless variations of your favorit gameplay, but also created easy-to-use AND (mostly free) to obtain tools and helping programs, which get you started.

Well, this blubbering is all about one question:
Is there a tool around to edit ship models for EOC, their textures, their hardpoints and so on, WITHOUT the need for lightwave or max3ds or all the other moneyintense programs ?[?]