3DS import in Poser quite often goes wrong in my experience. Better to load the .OBJ, which is Poser's native geometry format.

For the rest I agree with vince3: create the scene in Poser, and save separate .pz3 files, one with only the ship, and one pz3 per character on the ship. Import a .pz3 in Vue Infinite, fix up the materials, and save as .VOB. If you do this for every .pz3 you can start a fresh scene (Vue 5 Infinite suffers from memory leaks!) and use the .VOB files in the scene.

I've made scenes with over a dozen Poser people (Millenium 3 figs), plus complex props and many rocks and trees this way.

A tip: if you're going to use this ship plus several Poser people, chances are that the people will look fairly small in the final render. A 4000x4000 skin texture is a tremendous waste of resources. dburdick has a tutorial on how to make procedural skin in Vue Infinite - distant figures can use these skin shaders, you'll save a lot on texture memory.
You can also make a scaled down copy of the skin texture using Photoshop or PSP. 1000x1000 is more than enough for a figure that won't be higher than 500 pixels in the final render...

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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