Building the landing gear
We'll do the landing struts together, but you can feel free to finish off the actual skids yourself:
I kept mine pretty simple, compared to other parts of the ship:
Once you've got the skid plate done, make sure to make it a separate object (if it's not already). We're going to use a neat trick to finish this up.
Make a copy of the landing gear part and move it to the rear section (or front, if you modeled the rear). Then, under your Mesh tab, you can assign both of these objects the same mesh data:
Now, whenever you make a change to one of them, the change will carry over to the other as well.
Of course, you could just model one and then duplicate it, but sometimes it's nice to see how the part will look in multiple locations. For instance, the cutouts are slightly different between the front and back of the ship. As you're modeling it, you'll want to make sure that it will fit both areas.
The first detail we'll add is a mounting bracket for our struts to go on...