yeah thx jsprogg..the plan is to have two subs one for long shots and one for closeups...unfortunately the long shots make up about 5% of the shot list lol...

The thing I have thought of to try is to extract the plane were the pieces need to go.

figure how many extruded pieces fit in that plane combine them and shape the surrounding plane of those combined pieces to fit the extracted plane and drop it in the extracted space and merge the vertices....

but I am hoping as a noob I am missing something much easier...