For unit ranks i think you could have something like
Basic: No shirt, pants or loincloth. Plain shield
Advanced: Simple tunic without pants
Elite:Simple tunic with or without pants, cloak, painted shields.
Champions: Torcs, finer tunics with pants, finer cloaks, painted shields. Perhaps headdress or some kind of leather/cloth armor for champions too.
Yes, with decomposition I meant what causes the translation (your normal) and rotation (the perpendicular projection of your normal respect to the lever). By "radial" I mean the force vector applied to the centre of the object would give the direction of motion, which in your case it's the normal since you are dealing with a contact force. I tend to visualise things in a more abstract way (there are force vectors), and you in a causal way (the contact is a normal force). So all seems fine.
Yes. Imagine a ball moving slowly, but rotating really fast. If you push it off centre (on the half rotating away from you), doing so "in tandem" with its translation wouldn't benefit its rotation much, for that you would need to do it "in tandem" with its rotation, otherwise you fall behind, as previously explained (Edit: doing it faster would also work, since the system is not resonant). Now, all that is just to justify that you can have independent scaling for translation and rotation. If choke points will be a mess or not, hard to tell without trying, that's why I said "hopefully", having in mind that in choke points relative speeds could become quite random, but hopefully low enough, although if objects accelerate instantly I have less hopes for things to work out (I hope ships need to accelerate though, otherwise my coming ramming ideas won't be as nice).