lovely model but those planes look horrific, honestly just do it with some real geometry - the additional polygons are less of a performance drain than 18 transparent pixels on top of each other and look much nicer. As shadownami92 says, this isn't even player facing and from another player's perspective it's going to be…
@Chimp These planes are 2 sided so I actually did what you suggested first allready this mesh is going to be used in the by now ancient game Jedi Academy, and I am allready quite high in tri and vertex count (even for a viewmodel, which this is going to be) which is why I chose to alpha map the ribs of the front grill…