Pod Racer progress

I chose to do a Pod racer for my first model, My aim is to animate a race using a number of pod racers. The idea of the pod racer is it is quite symmetrical, and also most pod racers have two identical engines which can easily be achieved in 3DS Max. 

My first pod racer is coming along very well, it has taken a while and started as a basic cylinder shape. the first problem i encountered was extruding a 'ring' of the cylinder to get the basic shape I wanted. I ended up deleting the ring rather then extruding it, the basic extrusion extruded each 'rectangle' individually, rather then a fluid ring, I attempted to get round this by deleting the edge segments but ended up deleting the entire ring. 

I resolved this by re-creating the polygons and edges and extruding again using the edges not the polygon faces. I also felt there was a large number of polygons at this moment in time, but felt I would cut this down at the end by deleting vertex and edges I don't really need. 

 the second problem I made myself was after I created the 'engine' part, which I created from the basic cylinder, using the inset and extrude tools, the problem being to animate, or change this became a nightmare as it was part of the basic shape, as I didn't think of this as a component to it. 

 I decided to leave this, and look into detaching parts of models to try and detach the parts I wanted, and then repair the rest. In the meantime I also created the wing for the outside of my first engine, a simple rectangle was created, then a cylinder to cookie cut the curves. 




I could not find a simple way to detach the engine component from the main model, which would have been less time consuming to repair afterwards, I chose to delete the part all together, leaving a whole, and then create the engine part again using the same method. The aim is to have this animated and spinning on its center pivot like a plane engine. it started from a circle, extruded, and then inset a number of times, and then deleting unwanted polygons, also a slight rotation was made to create the slight angle on each 'blade' 

I have also extruded and started adding details on the side, as separate components, there is also an instance of the engine at the back, to be animated in the same way, to create the effect is spins all the way through the model. I am happy with the outcome so far, but feel there is more tools to 3DS Max I can utilize in the next models.