Well everyone, we will all know now why we have polygon clipping on models. I received a responce from JCL and after he looked at my level with the model in question his reply was:

JCL:
The transparent polygons are normal behaviour of the engine - a model polygon is not rendered if any vertex is behind the camera. Therefore models can be used for actors, but not for large landscape objects - except
when they are built from a large number of small polygons. I admit that this was not documented so far, so I have included the following to the documentation:

"Note that for speed reasons model polygons are not rendered if they are
completely or partially behind the the camera. Therefore a model should
consist of relatively small polygons."

Ron:
When you say behind the camera that it is only necessary for the vertices to be out of the field of view of the camera and not necessarily physically behind the camera.

JCL:
No, only polygons physically BEHIND the camera are clipped away.

Ron:
If I understand you correctly if this particular model was a map entity instead of a model then the problem of transparent polygons would not arise even if I was to increase the size?

JCL:
Yes. The best way is to build them anew. Conversion MDL->MAP is not possible
through a program, for various reasons (well it is theoretically possible,
but the result won't be useable).

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So the blunt of this problem is do not use large polygons for large surface areas in a model like I was trying to do. so I guess I am going to have to either forget about the planet surface modeling and go directly underground or find a way to convert 3DS max files to a map format while retaining the textures. I came across one but it did not work and if it had it was only good for I think 16 faces. So now what to do? Any lightbulbs out there (smile)?

And thank you again Doug and JCL for all of your help and resolving this problem as fast as you did.

Ron