Hull detail

Question for those who build hull sprites from scratch:

How much detail is too much?
I ask because when the image is compressed and shrunk in dimensions, a lot of finer detail gets lost. When undertaking a large project of many ships, a lot of time could be wasted on fine detail that wasn’t necessary in the first place.
Doe anyone have any advice or opinions?

I find 2 pixels = 1 meter is high enough. I believe the maximum zoom is 4-5x the hull size, so I’s say 5 pixels/meter as maximum.