I'll be interested to see how that pans out - sounds suspicously complex to me...
I personaly think this is the more challenging mesh. There's the need to keep the count down and it has a twin boom.
Remember, the key to a good landing is a good approach. What I mean by that here is plan how you're going to do the mesh before you (meterphoically speaking) put pen to paper. Study the plans, think about how you're going to construct it.
I always start with a cube, then reset the parameters to provide the requisite number of divisions in depth and width. Decide that by the number of direction changes in the drawing. The same goes for height, how many "layers" are there to the design. Don't worry about details like a bridge or fins, they can be extruded in later, just focus on the basic hull form.
The one thing to remember early on when choosing the number of divisions is to make sure you have a centreline of vertices. That way you only need to model one half, you can delete the unmoddeled half, and duplicate and merge the modelled side. This will save a lot of time and effort rather than trying to keep both sides symetrical as you build.
Hmm, I should probably do a tutorial at some point, if nothing else will give me reference if I ever take a break lol.
Anyway, apologies if I'm teaching you to suck eggs. My sister is also learning Maya for her degree, and I was quite frankly shocked that she didn't know these little tricks.
Oh, one last thing to keep in mind. Maya has a nice little poly counter to help you keep track of things like total polys and also what's selected (very useful in ensuring you haven't accidently grabbed vertices elsewhere on the mesh). But here's the thing - Maya does polys in, well pretty much however you do it. It handles squares best though. Milkshape only does triangles. So when you convert your mesh from a .mb into milkshape the count will roughly double!