Thanks for the comments so far. It may seem a bit elitist and snotty of me, but I'm waiting for someone who's very good at coding the weapons and importing into BC to express interest before I release these models. I feel that if I put months or years of my time into making my work high quality, then I'd really rather not have a crappy job done on the non-modeling part.
Starship: You nailed it on the head! I start out with a spline cage, using a background image as a guide. Once I have the basic shape caged out I play around with the spline until get the shape and the smoothness that I want. Once that task is accomplished I refine the splines until I have all 3- or 4-sided sub-shapes so that a surface can be applied. Then I add an Edit Poly modifier for each task I want to do like adding details, optimizing the mesh, etc. Below is an image of the spline cage for the Mogai head so far. You can't tell in the spline picture, but I have 5 separate objects in the head so far. I used to try spline caging the entire ship, but that was WAY too complicated. So, I took a page out of DJ's book and just did small bits of the ship one at a time. Below that is the wireframe of the Mogai and the Merian. The Mogai is currently sitting at 1,035 polygons without much optimizing and the Merian is at 5,991.