Hello, I'm horrible at explaining exactly what I mean, and it's not just with maya, it's with anything, pictures help a lot so I'm hoping this is helpful in you answering these questions for me, I will try and word my questions and good as I can.

I would like to know how some of you would go about doing this. I'm making a propeller on a ship that I started in the challenge form but was not able to work on for a couple of weeks. Now I was wondering is it necessary for me to connect the propellers to the object I have circled?

If I do should I combine or boolean? I tried both already and undid it because it came out a mess with 3 sided geometry. Is having a few 3 sided pieces of geometry going to effect it if it were to get animated? Will the animation need the propellers and the circled object combined to work properly?

How necessary is it to combine objects if they are going to be animated? If it's going to just remain a model is it necessary to combine objects?