My question isn't about the feasibility of the MDL size but rather about why they take up so much more RAM than the file size is. We're not using any shaders or anything. It's just the MDL files, a level, and that's it.
Please, no opinions on whether you think things are too large, etc. 40MB is not too high for us. We have a published game that's been selling well for a month now with several animated MDL files that are over 100MB. People love our game and it runs fine. I'm just interested in technical responses regarding my question.