If your ship doesnt transform or change the position of the verticies in some sort of animated way. There likely isn’t any good reason to make it a skeletal mesh in the first place.
The engine is incredibly bad at physics (particularly skeltal ones), so that’s definitely a reason to avoid skm also.
Skm is also a pain to light correctly, so that’s count 2 of not using it unless you have to.
If you are looking to animate parts - say the tail of a plane for instance, the best way is to have separate parts, and change their rotation on a single axis.
How, how much, etc, thats all depending on how you want the player controller to handle things / and or, how you process input on the thing itself.
I can’t say I have seen any good examples of this as a public tutorial unfortunately.
Btw,
a pro skm reason cold be 1 draw call over several.
Unfortunately, thats really the only real benefit I can think of when dealing with non organics…