To do tile mapping you will need a basic idea of uv unwraping. Have a look at some Wings 3D unwrap tutorials to get the idea.
Next have a look at some of the ships. The FS low poly ones. Don't touch anything high poly at the beginning. Cargo pod > Fighter > Cap ship. Take one apart to see how it was done.
With most unwraping you need to keep the uv bits inside the texture square (10242 etc ) But with tile mapping, if you make a uv island four times larger than the texture, it will end up with the texture repeating four times. So for tile texturing it's all about scale and positioning.