Vehicle creation and general modeling/texturing questions

ok first of all i couldnt post in the A3 subforums (something about forum permissions) so im just posting this here.. hopefully a mod can move this over.

So yeah im new to arma 3 modding but i found the make arma not war contest and figured i'd enter.

The idea is to make a plane, and i just have some questions to help me get started.

1) I did some research and found the model budget is 32k verts for a vehicle.. does that include the cockpit/gears (stuff that you could hide or use a lower LOD when its not in use)? what about texture budgets?

2) how exactly is the cockpit and gears handled? do they have to be a part of the main plane entity or can they be seperate entities with seperate LOD structures (since they are higher density in detail as compared to the rest of the fuselage).

3) can the cockpit and gears have their own materials? i guess this depends heavily on question 2)

4) how are decals handled in the arma engine? im guessing the texture budget wont allow for the finer texture details on the fuselage directly on the main texture, so is there a way to apply text and decals on to the model. alpha masked decals overlayed through a secondary UV would be my preferred method but dunno if thats possible.