For starters, I'd reccommend getting your hands on a decent free modelling program. The ones I'd suggest are Wings3D (
http://www.wings3d.com/ ), Blender (
http://www.blender3d.com/cms/Home.2.0.html), or Anim8tor (
http://www.anim8or.com/). Get a feel for the different options, and pick the one that best suits you current abilities. If you're a beginner, I'd reccomend starting with Wings3d before you move to a more advanced prgram like Blender. Each of these programs has quite a few tutorials to follow, and each has a decent-sized following to ask specific questions of.
Once you have a 3d program, and you're reasonably comfortable with it, it's time to go shopping for references. Look through WCNews and get aas many reference pictures of the Snakier as you possibly can. Browse through them often, and get an intimate familiarity with the design. Learn exactly what goes where.
Then start modelling in whichever program you've got. Make no mistake, you'll probably go through 3 or 4 iterations before you're happy. Pay particular attention to the polycount of the ship. I'd reccommend not going over 15,000 polies for the ship. Sounds like a lot, I know - but once you get into doing curved sufaces, that number gets eaten up fairly quickly.
As soon as you have your model, you'll want to texture it. To do so, I suggest Photoshop as the primary tool. If you don't have it or are unwilling to pay for it, the GIMP is probably your best option (
http://www.gimp.org/) Again - learn the programs so you can know what your options are. You'll probably also want to throughly learn how your 3d program handles UV unwrapping. Plenty of tutorials are available on the specifics of that process as well...Google is your friend.
After you have a model, texture and the UV's unwrapped, it's time to put it into a game. There are several options available to you at this point - everythign from Homeworld 2 to Flight Commander. Choose whichever one best fits the setting and feel that you want your ship displayed it.
I hope you have begun to realize what an undertaking this is. This task will likely not be measured in weeks, but months. I say this not to discourage you, but to give you a reasonable expectation fo what you're getting into. It will not be a quick process.However, once you're done it the first time, all subsequent efforts take much less time to complete. And despite how it seems, this is an immense amount of fun. Once you have the skillset, there's really no limit to what type of ship/terrain/characters/whatever you can create.
Best of luck!