Q:

I know I should try to find this one out for myself, but I wondered if there is a "standard" way of making animated fanblades in a jet engine?
Do I treat it like a propeller or is there a better way of doing this? Do I make a disc within the engine, texture it with fanblades and animate the disc? 
I could always try all methods that have crossed my mind, but as you know, it's time consuming to test them all, so a shortcut would be nice... 

A:
               
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The way I did it was to use the "prop" (still, slow and blurred) approach. Made a texture with 3 different bladerotations  
And then mapped each to the 3 pieces of geometry inside the engine. I found something in the makemdl that says "engine_rpm" but I haven't tried it yet. 
Thats it!! 

Peter