First thing to do would be chop the ship in half. You should only UV one half of a symmetric model. I assume maya will have some kind of mirror modeller feature that will show the full model but only let you edit the half that actually exists - if so, that's the best thing to use.
The process of UV mapping a complex shape like this will typically not involve the cubic projection type you have in that screenie. It's more a matter of selecting segments of the model and applying a UV projection to just that section, and then moving it into place on the texture area. Another way to think of it is just re-rranging the faces on top of the texture to tell them which bits of the texture they should use. This means they can overlap, but I would recommend you try to avoid that if at all possible, as if you eventually come to start baking ambient occlusion to the texture, overlapping bits cause problems. This isn't a set rule or anything though so you don't need to worry if you do do overlaps.
Here's the new Aten as an example of what I mean by segmenting bits for individual UV projections:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/VA--Twisted_Infinities/BlenderTutorialStuff/UVmapping1.jpgNotice the top shell thing has been selected in the 3d window and a top-down projection has been applied to it which you can see in the right window. In blender this involved facing the camera to where I wanted to create the UV projection from, but you should also have options such as some kind of unwrap. Unwrapping is typically most important in objects with curved or complex surfaces like your fighter here, and reduces or prevents some faces being assigned to a ridiculusly tiny area of texture to use. This would create the ugly lines or blurred bits you can see in parts of low-medium quality models. A good example of this in FS is the inside of the Cain's three arms. They take up basically no area of the texture, meaning they have no detail applied to them. Looks horrible.
Anyway - the workflow of UV mapping I use is basically:
1) Divide model into sections of continuous surfaces, only making seams where they're less likely to be visible such as in recessed/dark areas or where one shape on the hull meets another.
2) UV project the sections one by one from a direction that allows neat, roughly fair share of the available area between all the faces in the section.
3) Manually correct any problems on each section such as stretching or unwrapping hiccups etc.
4) Move the whole section off to the sides of the texture and start on the next until they're all done.
5) Like a big jigsaw puzzle, arrange all the pieces onto the available texture area so that they give a fairly uniform distribution of the detail. Ie, if you have a small piece and a big piece of model, they appear small and big respectively on the UV map.
