Ship Sets: How Do You Do Them?

[Puke]

I want to make a shipset with some very simple 3d shapes. It could be done entirely with textured spheres and oblongs, but liquid effects and translucense would be nice as well. what would be ideal is to be able to plop down a high polygon sphere or two, and 'drag' extrusions from it.

any recomendations on a free 3d program that i can download that would make this fairly easy to do? or if not, what would let me plop together some textured spheres and oblongs?

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"...the green, sticky spawn of the stars"
(with apologies to H.P.L.)