hi [icarus_uk] - the model is 100 percent nurbs - the air scoop was made by a combination of methods to get surfaces: I believe I drew a curve in the side view and then made a profile path and extruded it to get the base of the air scoop. The mouth was modeled from a nurbs sphere. I tweaked the shape of the base with a lattice and when the basic shapes were there I trimmed out the hole in front by going to the front view, drawing a curve in the shape of the hole and projecting it onto the sphere. Then I offset the surface to get an inner surface and lofted between them to give the scoop a feeling of volume.

Then I did a circular fillet between the base and the mouth of the scoop to make it look like one piece. I checked 'curves on surface' so that when the fillet was done I could trim away the back of the mouth so there would be a hole leading down into the base. Obviously that's going a little bit overboard but it's good practice or if you're going to be shooting that close...

Okay, then finally I did a circular fillet beween the body of the machine and the base so they joined together smoothly. The modular look comes from using different primitives and the smooth joins from fillets.

I love nurbs.

Zen and the art of nurbs.

These techniques I learned mostly from the wrx tutorial at the following link:

https://www.blissdd.com/WRX/Tutorial/tutorial.html

subds bring polygons to the next level but modeling in nurbs is like meditating on higher mathematics. (I guess...)