3ds max animation question

[SplitPersona]

I've finally got a prototype engine up and running, so now I'm moving on to some prototype meshes for my game (been using the stuff that came with ogre so far).

I'm making a shooter like Gradius, only Einhander for the PSone is where most of my inspiration to make this came from. As of right now I'm not planning on doing any complex animations (solo project, and I'm pretty much a 3ds noob); if the player moves the ship, I'll rotate the SceneNode to achieve the look of the ship rolling.

However, I was thinking that when the player picks up a power up that adds a new weapon, there would be an animation showing a trap door on the ship open and the new weapon slide up out of it - very Transformers esque. Does anyone have any good pointers on how to do this?

Mainly I'm thinking:

1) The trap door/compartment/whatever is linked to a point. For the animation I would just translate the point in a certain direction (I could replace the point with a bone if Ogre requires it)
2) The mesh for the new weapon would have to be in the model so that it could be visible after coming up out of the trap door...but that means when the player doesn't have the weapon, I'm rendering extra polygons that can't be seen.

Am I making any sense at all?

[pix0l]

I think you could just have the various weapons for the ship on child scene nodes of the ship and only show them and play their animations when required. You could place them so that they start off inside the ship's trap door but not visible and therfore not rendering uneeded geometry that can't be seen. When it's time to show a weapon you could have the ship play an animation of the trap door opening and enable the visibility of a weapon and play its animation and move its scene node outside the trap door so it looks like its coming out of the ship.

As for how to actually implement this. I don't know I'm still an Ogre noob myself. Good luck. You'll probably get a more specific or accurate answer from someone with more experience.