Well, I have animated the first block (the block to the very left of the ship with the slanted edges) and it took me 1 - 1.5 hours and about 3 or 4 complete restarts until I did it by drawing and animating two wireframe-blocks and then cut the right amount out to create the slanted edges. It looks pretty good, but I really doubt that I'm gonna be able to keep this up... even for only one freaking ship. I only used 16 angles (and frames), but even that took quite a long time to do all the work and clean-ups for every frame. Put short: it's tiresome. A lot.
AND whenever I try to put on more details (textures, if you will), like the gray front part of the piece or the two small "holes" on top of the piece, it's pretty much impossible for me to add those to every frame by hand and have them not appear to move wrong. I'd needed to have added those in the wireframe-part, I guess, but then it would've been really, really, really messy and I'd probably had given up even earlier.
