Poly count

This will be a short post simply explaining my reasoning for keeping my ships with as low a poly count as possible, (preferably below 6000). The first and most obvious reason for this is for efficiency, as these models are being made with the intention to be used in an animation, and to animate a 30 second animation using 3 models with high poly counts would take an exceptionally long time to render out, especially on my personal computer, which does not have anywhere near the RAM needed to quickly render an animation of this size and complexity. So understanding my constraints was necessary for me to complete my models and animation to a satisfactory degree. This is also the reason I need to be careful of wasted faces, or faces that will not be visible due to being hidden by other faces on the model, for the sake of efficiency I should look to delete any of these faces that I find on my models. This also means being more picky about what I need to model and what would be better as a texture, so for example a panel filled with electrical wiring would not be efficient to model, so it would be better to texture the wires on , this can work in any situation as long as the camera will not be zooming into this part of the ship, as that situation would make it necessary to add more detail to any part of the ship heavily featured in the animation.
Going back to constraints I would have neither the time nor the experience in Maya that would be required to make what would be a professional level ship from star wars, so going into this assignment with those kinds of expectations would be unreasonable.