Instancing:

 

Besides instancing, I also got model-loading to work for this assignment

Ships are rotated, translated, and have 50% variance in scaling in all x, y, and z

Heres a picture with two spaceships instanced 100 times

Poly count = 26,000x100 = 2,600,000

 

This one has two ships instanced 1000 times (poly count = 26,000,000)

 

Finally, this one (although a little hard to see) has 4 ships per instance (about 60,000 polys) with 17,500 instances (just over 1 billion polys)