Ye your suffering from the same problem I initially had with game modelling, which is adapting from CAD modelling.
You basically need to forget everything you've learnt while doing CAD, and have to think and work in a totally opposite way from how you would model in CAD, since as I said before, in CAD, you make something as accurately as possible, ignoring everything else, and in game modelling, your only making things look right, while keeping them as optimized as possible, and able to work with the game engine. So all those tiny boxes you have done, connecting the launcher base to the launcher tube, could be done with one box, with it textured to show the details the other boxes would give, saving a lot of tris, and that little bar with modelled holes in it, shouldn't be done like that, it should just be a rectangle with painted holes, at most even with a transparency map for the holes but they are so small, tbh all you need is to paint some black holes on the side and be done with it.
And Welding objects and Attaching objects are two totally different things. Welding means like it does in r/l almost, that it is fully attached to the same element, though welded up vertices and tris etc. If you do not weld stuff, you get serious
Z-Fighting issues and/or, waste a lot of UV space. There are exceptions where you shouldn't weld objects up as it may affect the smoothing etc, but for the most part, it is best to weld stuff up and the saving in UV space alone is worth it and only things that shouldn't be welded up are objects that are too small to free up any usable UV space and that will not zfight.
Here are the UVs for the Tigercat SAM for example, which I showed above:
Note how holes in the UVs, which are from welding up areas, are used to pack other UVs in, with a few exceptions like the missile base plate, since that in its LODs is turned flat without the indented holes, to save on tris, and needs the texture in the middle of it for those LODs.
LOD0:
http://i.imgur.com/ncZxdc7.jpg
LOD1:
http://i.imgur.com/EPvE9L2.jpg
Checker map overlay:
And the end texture:
with the texture on it (missile texture is on a separate sheet):
https://www.realitymod.com/forum/f196-p ... stems.html
The best thing to do is study other models in the game, using the
BF2Editor, or the simpler alternative is
BFMeshView, and just look at how the models are made, with edges etc turned on and just study them, especially if you wonder how you should do a certain bit, and also if you need to, ask questions here and people will help out
