Yes, sounds are defined in baseitems.2da, and by default there are only 3 types of saber - short, single, double. You'd have to create new base item types for unique sounds, but I don't know if that would actually work for sabers given that upcrystals.2da only accepts the 3 base saber types.
I've had a few different ones over the years. The latest is a Prusa i3. Seems like it's generally considered the best hobby-level FDM printer, so every man and his dog has one.
There's a chamfer that runs through the middle of the ring of holes. The marks are from the way the printer handled the top layer on the inside half of that chamfer. On the outside, the filament was laid down in a series of nice, neat concentric circles in parallel with the outside diameter of the part. On the inside it looks like it has mushed in some infill in various criss-cross patterns rather than doing a neat top layer. The part probably needs some custom settings for those layers, to force it to use solid infill (although it should have handled that automatically).
Booster main component. There are two more pieces still to be printed that act as inserts at each end and join with the clamp and handwheel, but those will mostly end up hidden.
Balance pipe (emitter) printed in 4 separate pieces, two of which had to be glued together. I had to split one piece into two because of issues with bed adhesion.
Yep, normal map functionality has been implemented. It was a two part issue, requiring both stuff in the model and saving the maps as TPCs. The models in this thread all use normal maps. There are some engine limitations regarding what you can do with them though, particularly when trying to combine them with envmaps.
Rough positioning of currently printed parts. Having the real thing in-hand, and going back and looking at reference pics, I think my handwheel is undersized. It's maybe in the ballpark of 80-90% of what the real thing looks to be. Unfortunately the only source of specific measurements I could find turned out to be primarily based on the ROTS hilt, which is wrong. So I guess I will be printing those parts again at some point. But I'll print everything else first, see how it all goes together.
That would be a combination of scripting and plot flags I assume. The dialogue fires a script that sets the flag in one module, then the onload script in the other module checks the flag and spawns the item when it reads the proper value.