I have taken an interest in hard surface modeling lately and would love to see an advanced hard surface modeling tutorial.

Take a look at Paldav's starwars thread. I would love to see a tutorial that covers the detailed physical modeling and also covers when, why and HOW to model / simulate fine details using normal maps.

I'd like to see some detailed tutorials on hard surface texturing including bump and normal mapping for panel line details and such.

I have seen a lot of work on par with pavdav's in the forums. I will search around an post some links in this thread.

The only highly detailed modeling tutorials I have seen come from the 3D-Palace site for 3ds. But the author physically models every single bit, creates really poor topology with tons of n-gons and non-manifold geometry, which seems to me would be difficult if not impossible to texture map, ends up with really heavy models that I am guessing have like 100's of millions of poligons and file sizes of gigabytes in size.

This is in no way meant to put down Chris's work, it really looks great! But I have seen models that are as detailed as his work without being so poly heavy with all sorts of wacky topology. I have never seen any of his really detailed stuff with anything more complex then procedural shaders. 3ds max must have some kind of magic smoothing tools because when I tried to smooth things in Maya with the same topology as his models in max, well if my computer had an ejection seat attached to the CPU it would pop out of the top of machine and go through the roof!

Max does have a greeble add-on but it creates mega heavy and nearly impossible to uv and texture map models.