Tweety:
Thanks, my scene is pretty crowded,but the pods (both red and green ones) are very very small, some you can hardly see and I'm liking how it's ended up so just have to hope everyone else does too! I had pretty much the same amount of layers and struggled to get the rendering done but just about managed and it's finished now!
Hope you manage to get it sorted, viruses are a pain in the arse!

Chirone:
Thanks too, the red textures are very basic as the pods in the final are tiny! But glad you like them! It's just different shades of red here and there, a sponge filter applied in photoshop with blur added, and a couple of dirt maps with opacity lowered to desired levels. You can't see any of that detail in the final image but just wanted them to look alright as I want to do an animation of this sometime.

Hammer:
The wires/tubes don't disappear into nothing, it's just the angle it's at and as you said I used sun and sky to light it as I wanted it lit quickly so I could post it and move on.The starry background is a mentalray lookup BG node though, not added in photoshop.
The textures are basic, not a layered shader, just photoshop work as explained above.