Trying to Model Spaceship Cuttouts - (Come Help Me Improve my Topology!)

Hello friends! I’m a relatively new blender user (only just picked it back up a year or two ago and trying to get past the basics so I can start modeling my own personal projects) and I recently decided that I wanted to improve my topology and hard surface modeling. To do so I decided to model the CCS cruiser from the Halo universe due to its daunting curves and unfamiliar topology. I’m pretty pleased with how far I’ve gotten, and I’m almost done blocking out the main model so I can get to work on greebles, details and and other goodies like texturing and materials.

HOWEVER (and it is a big however) I have gotten stuck on one particular part of this ship. On the underside is a series of spider-like cutouts in the hull that I can’t figure out how to model. Traditional methods like booleans and remeshing with the vanilla knife tool aren’t cutting it for me and I just for the life of me can’t figure out how to approach it without destroying my entire mesh. This may be a result of my topology flow which is admittedly pretty messy, or maybe I just am too far into the modeling process to go back and do it now. Either way, some community advice would be appreciated as this is a particular skill I’ve never been good at and want to learn.

Here above are the cutouts I need to make, and below is my mesh as it currently stands.

There are two possibilities:

  1. do sundivide at the proper edges and slide vertices to the proper position to really cut this away and then extrude further…or
  2. make additonal obejct shrinkwrap onto this model and model the proper edges and after appling the modifier then extrude further.
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