Using gigantic textures, eh?

I don't know much about graphics engine programming, but I'd say that any engine surely would not waste available system memory by loading same sets of data for each instance in the game. I mean, its probably not even basic optimization, but common sense.

So I think you are pretty safe in assuming that individual textures are loaded only once and then called up on demand within the game engine. And even if you would need a dev to reply in order to get a definitive answer, just think about it - each ship in the game uses texture sets from ~3Mb to ~15Mb in size... multiply that with the number of ships you get in one battle and imagine the system requirements on that one...

If it calls for the same texture file it stands to reason that one of the following occurs:

-if the texture data was preloaded, then the memory-resident copy of the texture is used no matter if its a copy of an object or an entirely different object - they all point to the same texture

-if the texture data was not preloaded, then the same as the above only there may be a slight slowdown when the data is loaded into memory (more so if the page file is used)