I’ve been working on the pilot area of the Skimmer for the last week or so. I don’t have a lot of reference for it, because there just weren’t a lot of good views of it in the show. The instrument panel I may eventually replace with a bump map, if I can figure out how to make one good enough.
Here’s something interesting. There are actually two versions of the Skimmer in the Roughnecks TV show. The first is the one that I am building, and it’s the one used on Hydora, Earth, and Tesca Nemerosa. But on Tophet and Klendathu they use a different version.
This one has an enclosed cockpit and cargo bay. 
This skimmer also seems to be larger, with room up front for two pilot seats, and a much more spacious cargo bay. The seats in the back are arranged differently.
The front stabilizer wings are different on this one.
I'm also seeing diffences in the pieces and parts on the top of the ship. 
This version reminds me a little of the Raptors from Battlestar Galactica
I made some big leaps forward on the skimmer model. I'm pretty content with what I'm seeing right now.
Hey, this thing is starting to resemble a Skimmer! Spending gawdawful amounts of time trying to get all those smooth sloping angles right, but it’s starting to pay off. Don’t think I’ll ever be able to get it dead on accurate to the original but I think it will end up being pretty cool.
For anyone looking for Starship Troopers models from the movie, you might want to head over to Foundation 3d. They have some in their mesh downloads section. You will need to create an account there to download, but it free and easy to do.
I found an interesting model for sale over at TurboSquid. I’d seen this arachnid warrior before, but I just noticed that the same modeler made a Retrieval Ship model also. Looks great. I have to admit, when I first saw it I was trying to figure out how someone had got a copy of the model I’d built. Once I looked closer at the pics, though, I could see the differences. The description says that his model has the cockpit, something I have not got around to doing yet. Kudos to modeler PrezBush for a couple of nicely made models.
After I finished the Marauder I thought I would give building a bug another shot. I’ve tried building arachnids many times over the years since I started using blender, each time with less than spectacular results. One of my big glaring weak spots is organic modeling. This time I spent a week or so trying to get something good going before I gave up on it. I did learn a lot from the experiment, though, added a bunch more tricks to my repertoire. I managed to get some interesting things going in the model, but nothing close enough to the original to encourage me to keep going. Below is a screenshot of where I stopped. 
In the center is a reference pic of the original warrior bug from the TV series (downloaded from here). I can’t tell if a lot of the detail that I am trying to model is actually a result of textures. It seems like modeling it would require far more polys than they would have likely have used. Anyway, I moved on to another project, this time the Skimmer from the TV show. Here’s a reference pic I downloaded from John McGinley's old website before it went belly up.
Here's my progress so far: 
The work is going slow. I feel like I spent 98% of the time doing things that I will have to undo and redo. Progress is being made though, and I feel like I can get there from here.
