Thanks Chavfister and SilverFeather. I've decided to keep the habitat ring and the outer docking ring and apply your suggestion about separating the rings from the prominade with proximity. I think it's called level streaming. I'll check it out and try and implement it.

I'll need to study udk lighting to figure out the best way to light everything. Because of the lighting, it takes 3 to 4 minutes to build each time I add new stuff. I also get alot of error messages saying that I don't have lightmap index for each mesh so I'll have to figure out what that means and how to solve it.

As far as geometry, my entire scene is less than 25k tris. I don't know how many tris are ok for a game environment but I'm guessing I'm on the low side.

Didn't feel like recording a play test of everything so here's some screen shots.