How to interrupt animation then reverse back to idle state

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…