This place alive?

[Unregistered]

I was wondering if anyone could give me tips on modelling, or had a good site that I could read up at. I did my first foray into modelling yesterday, and although I don't think the results were terrible, I obviously don't have a lot of experience and don't know how to get lots of polys in the right places. I seem to waste a lot on flat surfaces when I let Wings3D tesselate for me, the following are two quick models I came up with. I know, the texturing job is laughable.. They're somewhat Wing Commanderish, but that wasn't really my intention.

How hard is it to cut the hull out for a fighter deck? Is it something that I need to do as I'm building the model, or is it feasible to do afterwards?

 

[Unregistered]

They're also around 900 polys as it is, with plenty wasted on the flat areas.. :\ I'll probably rebuild them from scratch before I try to add any detail to them, another problem I ran into was that when Wings3D tesselates for me, it tends to go "|\|\|\|" across the model instead of having say "|\|\|/|/|". Is there an easy way to cut the model in half and mirror itself? It makes one side look funny around some of angled areas of the hull, I manually fixed most of it.. but I imagine most people wouldn't spend half their time doing that.