I , out of boredom, went ahead and tried it with SDK and got pretty good results actually. a few quirks that i didnt take the time to work out. trying to key frame some things the scale nodes on a piece of geometry that i was useing as a stand in kept resetting back to default setting when i clicked on a new frame in the time slider, but..Other then that, it all worked pretty well for what i was thinking. Though i am sure there could be a mel script out there or one that can be written that woudl give better control and there is the drawback when using sdk's that If i wanted to animate say the craft flying from -10,-5,1 to 10,5,-1 in axis, i'd have to leave the control object at the origin and not parented to the driven object...of course i suppose i could use the rotate nodes on the control object as the driver so that the translate nodes wouldn't affect ...Non the less, it works, and its very quick and easy to setup and get a pretty decent control over the animation in little of no time. I am still interested in the feed back though Jay once you receive it.

G-man