Haha, I hope you did not take me wrong about starting over or redoing anything. It was more of a side note. This is probably one of the cases that a boolean is fine sense you will probably not going to get to close to most of the parts. There is a funny thing that happens when you are making a model like this. You have to know what you want out of it and it might be a great time to ask yourself now.

For an animation, how close do you want to get and to what part of the ship. You can do rough 3d animatics now and play with deferent ideas. The texture maps on a full render do not have to be much over 1K for large areas and 16 x 16 for the smaller areas. If you are going to get close, you nead much larger maps and will want to make sure you model so you can hide polys when they are not seen by the camera. If you are going to have a ship go into one of the bays, then you will have to model that one very high and maybe on a seperate file that you can seemlessly change from one model in the animation to the other. Mental ray really does not like much over one million polys with large textures. This is one of the types of models that you can model out until if will not render and give you nothing but headaches. I know I have done it. :headbang: I think you are doing a great job. I look forward to updates.:attn: