Cables from splines/lines with surface thickness?
 

I'm modeling a knit of interwoven cables. I made opposing curves using sine/cosine in Plot2D tool and have arranged them to have an "over/under" look with a clearance of 10cm. I have two options to give the cables thickness of about 5cm each:

1) Rail sweep a 5cm diameter polygon along the length of the splines. This works, but I have about 12km worth of cables and the object size increases to about 22MB. Not very manageable. I suppose I could use the splines(only 3MB) as a stand-in in Layout.

2) Give the splines themselves a thickness through a surface style.The only thickness I can seem to find is in "pixels". can I assign a measurable thickness? Would Sas-lite "strand" feature work for this?

Is there another option?

More on Wires
 

Here is an actual sample of what im doing. the tube is about 1m diam. and 100m long. I will eventually make it abouut 500m long and stretch the ends out to about 30m at each end to be anchored to towing/towed vessles. The mesh will look like a giant finger trap. I'm thinking Sas will take a LONG time to render this.

Anyone know of a better way to do this?

I take it that you require to have this level of detail in actual geometry? I'd be tempted to do this as a heavily subdivided cylinder with texture maps. Probably render a damn sight quicker too...

I tried using some sort of primitive to render its wires. But I coulndt seem to achieve that over-under weaving and rounded cable look.

I may just have to work around with having a separate stand-in object while setting up the scene.