Planetary Annihilation Models?

There is no "the annihilaser" because the planet can be any of a variety of sizes and there is no one mesh for it. The game uses Constructive Solid Geoometry (CSG), often driven by a seeded noise based generator; metal planets don't use as much randomness. The core planet geometry is a heightmapped sphere; metal planets have no height variation. So mesh wise, you need a sphere and a program that can do CSG/binary operations with the brush meshes, as well as some transforms on them (e.g. most of the metal brushes use one called 'longitude pinch')

Okay, it's getting there, but trust me, the worst part is trying to rig it. That's such a pain when the catalyst is only 1 object and is not connected to the amature.

Okay then, i'll see if i CAN find a program that uses CSG/binary operations.

Blender, Bryce, 3DsMax, Sketch-up, 3Delight, Clara.io, Maya, FreeCAD, VectorWorks, AutoCAD, TinkerCAD, UnrealED (UDK), Unity3D, and many more all support CSG operations.

I made a thing:

Oh wow, that helps a lot (not being sarcastic)

that image was without the sphere part, just a flat world.

My apologies , did you want links to tutorials too?
Assuming that your using blender this link maybe useful,,
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.4/Manual/Modifiers/Generate/Booleans

Edit..
Here's a link for the Blender manual for animation rigging.
http://www.blender.org/manual/rigging/

I'm not 100% sure on what it is exactly you trying to achieve or how experienced you are with the tools your using, so i don't really know how to help.
If you can explain in detail what your trying to achieve it might help a bit, also how much experience do you have with 3D modeling an animation, do i need to point out tutorial videos and manuals to help you get what you want done?

My first goal was to recreate everything from PA into Blender, but when I started on the Catalyst I knew that was not going to be the case. So now my minimal goal is to recreate the Annihilaser. And I'm fairly experienced, as I've been using blender for the past 2 years, and yet somehow failed to notice the CSG operation that was in Blender.

Edit: Only problem is, I can't make it so that the Catalysts are applied to a sphere, at the moment they look all right on a flat surface, but on a sphere it just goes through, I need it so that it goes around the sphere.

Edit 2: So I saw somewhere else that there's a thing called "Longitude pinch", I'll see if I can find that in blender.