How detailed can a sculpty be?

I'm just wondering.. where does it end?

I've got in my inventory a tower of flowers, made with 140 prims, all the basic twisted prim 'flower', we all know the type... I'd give a pic but not at home with SL at the moment...
Anyways, they are arranged in a curving pattern, wrapping as if on a cylinder, and with a kinda lattice effect, the whole intersecting paths thing.... would that be possible that detailed with a single sculpty? I was shown a beautiful sculpty picnic table yesterday, looked just like a normal prim one, with only 1 vs 7 or so... and that got me thinking, how detailed and accurate to normal prims can they be?

I'm not quite sure I fully understand your description of your "flower tower", but I'd say it's highly unlikely you could repilcate the whole thing with just a single sculpty. You could probably do it with a small handful of them, maybe half a dozen or so.

The answer to "where does it end" is it ends (and starts) with 32x32 vertices. Anything you can make out of that number of points, you can make into a sculpty. Anything that requires more detail than that will have to be more than one.