'tis all about construction. But first things first...
you need to work in units divisible by 8's for rotations, this will become apparent as you get further on, but generally when you do rotating units you'd work in 8, 16, 32's 64's and so on...
For the purposes of this example i'm gonna work in 16. But if you look at the F1 car in my sig you'll see it's in 32. Any more than that and you're making it hard on yourself and it's prolly a bit overkill.
You need to look at the object your gonna create and break it down in your mind into smaller elements. And animate each element into a rotation and then combine them.
Then it's 'simply' a case of construction:
- You need to work out a center line where the everything rotates around (that will help eliminate the positioning issue)
- next begin to define the rotational limits of the most extreme elements of the element (draw an elipse that encompases the element {in the the correct plane and attitude obviously})
- Then break that elipse down into segments, half it, half it again and again until you have an elipse that's split into 8, 16, 32, 64 etc...
- This will form the template for the bounding boxes corner points.
- Next up, define the points of your box, then animate them over 16 frames...
- add your details and shading... and bobs your uncle... one spinning thing
Have a look at this to get an idea:
That should set you on the right track especially for the DDP style ships, I hope you see how simple it is to create the basic shapes? The skill is the rendering of those shapes and being able to 'sculpt' them into more interesting shapes... the trick is to work in elements and then construct the whole from those pieces... (like lego) make the components, spin them and then combine... once combined you can then add additional shading, AA and what have you to gel them together...
It's long winded but the results can be fabulous. I can so visualise your ship using this method.
Of course, you could try and render it as a whole, but I think you'll discover it's a lot more difficult that way, as breaking it down will allowyou to focus on each element without getting distracted.
The racing car in my sig was done exaclty like this: the wheels, the areofoils, the chassis, the air intakes, all rendered spinning on the spot then glued into postion after wards on a generic (eliptical) template...
Good luck.