I have some reference pics that may help you w/ edgeloops. I don't know from where they come, but they're not from my models, all rights and respect to their respective creators: Just keep cracking at it and don't get frustrated.
I want to add details baked into diffuse map. Dents, cracks that sort of things. For this I planned to make a height map A, convert it to world normals and run it through Light node. Problem is UVs are usually packed to optimize texture space usage. Shells can be rotated, flipped or just curved surface flattened like in…