unique design you have there (for a freespace fighter at least)
if you really want to finish this in time to enter the contest, here is what i would do:
create the textures first, it's more important than lods or debris
you can even tilemap-texture it and then run SmartUV and bake all the textures if you want to be really quick about it
i for one always bake my textures, because i'm just not talented at texturing at all, i think it works good enough
to create lods and debris, blender has a really useful modifier called Decimate, check it out, combined with a bit of common sense it works quite well