oh so sledge does that mean that you would use Beaker's idea and have entitydistance and then a meshintersect.
It would be high on my list - if the shape of your ship allows entitydistance only then that would be even better.
i take it i can model a basic shape make it a child of the ship, then make its alpha zero and use that for meshintersect, so i can still have a detailed ship model ?
That's the idea. Bear in mind that flat meshes that overlap won't flag as intersecting with meshesintersect() - the meshes need to transcend all three axes.