question on mesh editing

heres is my project from the WIP forum



i have some questions regarding basic mesh editing. i have imported this STL geometry i have created using other software and am trying to use blender to tidy up the geometry. First of all how do you select, intersect and delete internal parts of the mesh. for example how do you delete the parts of the strut that protrude into the wing or the parts of the lower wing that protrude into the fuselage? the model geometry has been built up from various individual components like wings tail fuselage and i now want to join them all together and delete the internal intersecting parts.

second question is the second question is how do i smooth out the plan form outline of the wing without distorting the shape of the airfoil cross sections?

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if i use the smooth vertex function on the elliptical wing it appears to distort and shorten the airfoil cross sections. Alternatively how could i take an airfoil section like the one above and extrude it to produce a smooth elliptical planform wing (eg like a spitfire) whilst keeping the exact airfoil shape (the airfoil can be scaled up or down in size)

Also i cant seem to get the background images to show up. i was going to try to construct the elliptical wing using curves and surfaces but i cannot seem to get any background images to appear. i hope these questions aren’t to basic im new to blender
thanks for your help

Hello
to “delete” in Blender Editor select the desired items, then press X key!
H, Alt-H, and Shift-H are quite useful too ( hide, unhide, hide unselected)!
To create different “smooth effects” select the desired faces and “split” them with Y key!
And read some docs:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual

Bye