The simple answer from me would be to not use TS. This may not be the answer you're after, but I know from long experience that TS gets exceedingly cumbersome when dealing with complex objects.
The toolset is also clunky and difficult to use when creating complex geometry, meaning you need many many clicks in order to be able to do what other tools can do in a couple of clicks/keypresses.
TS
can achieve the sort of high detail you're after, but it will be ten times harder, ten times longer and infinitely more frustrating.
In terms of how the detail itself is added, well some prefer to grow it all out of a base object, but I like to build a ship in a combination of wireframe and individually created polys between the verts - as though it were a physical model wireframe model in my (highly accurate and non-corporeal) hands. It gives me an enormous level of control over the model (meaning I have almost never had geometry problems that weren't introduced by TS), and with a well-designed program workflow it allows you to build complex meshes very quickly.
Another advantage is that by starting out from the very beginning with a wireframe, you can set up a predrawn side on view of your ship and just trace the outline along the YZ plane. From there I usually go and make a top down outline as well, and from there it's just a 3d game of connect the dots (adding many many more as you go however.
).
These processes mostly apply to the base ship hull rather than tacced on greebles, but you should be incorporating significant greebles into the hull mesh anyway unless you intend to make them into detail-boxes. The key points to good greebles however are fairly simple:
1) Repetition: If you look in engines and other pieces of machinery, you'll always find some feature of it that is repeated. It is important to incorporate such detail into your ships carefully though, or you'll end up with more of a tile pattern than a greebled surface.
2) Looks first, logic second: If you don't want to put in a greeble that would look cool because it doesn't have a purpose, then you're missing the point of greebling! Go crazy, making whatever detail you like. If it looks cool, then that's all that really matters with greebling. (Pipes are a great way of adding greebles that look like they have purpose, even if they don't.)
3) Balance: The Star Destroyer is a prime example. One of the most complex ships around greeble wise, it has a perfect blend of heavy greebles, simple greebles and relatively bare surfaces - they all complement each other and the overall look is brilliant. What rules that balance follows exactly I'm not really sure, but just like most models should not be made of nothing but flat surfaces, neither should they be 100% greeble. (Usually.)
4) Shapes: Individual greebles don't actually have to be very complex. In fact, they can often look better if they're individually relatively simple - especially in a game context as it means you can afford to put many more of them on.
I *think* the main point is to basically provide a bit more detail than the eye can quickly take in or than the brain can easily describe. There are probably books published on the subject.
Oh, and specifically, never EVER divide a single face into many and build details from there. Otherwise you end up with ships that have so many redundant faces and verts it's just idiotic, and any detail you do create out of the subdivisions will look totally crap.
