I must admit I was about ready to give up on blender but I stayed with it and am not making progress by leaps and bounds on my effort to model a traveller ship. I've been working on a basic sulieman scout and have been using the rendered versions shown in GT books as a guide.
While I may not make exact duplicates of them, I'm coming closer to rendering a passable suileman scout, and have in fact opted to make some bits of mine, notable the windows on the front, slightly different that most versions I've seen because I think my version makes a bit more sense.
(I'm making the windows heavily slant forward to give the pilots more of a view outside, and the ability to look upward somewhat, which the normal flat windows didn't allow. Also by sharply slanting the windows it makes more sense aerodynamically than the flat windows. Lastly, sloping the windows makes them a little thicker and harder to penetrate from something coming straight on, in exactly the same way that sloped armor works on tanks.)
You need to install python on your windows system to run it steady, but blender is sure worth it. I've gone from not knowing the program at all to making extreme progress on my scout model, and am developing ideas as I go that may halp on my next plan: A beyowulf free trader.