A quick surface question

For all of you single surface gurus out there:

When I use copy mesh does that create a new surface, or attach it to the originating surface?

If it creates a new surface then:

I'm assigning "Weapons" to animated player meshes, of which there may be up to 32 at a time on the screen. As you can imagine, I need to cut my surfaces down as much as possible. Is there a relatively painless way to assign these weapons to like surfaces even though they'll be "attached"/parented to animated meshes?

It creates a new surface. Use copyentity whenever you can.

Thanks Bouncer.. But with CopyEntity, if I manipulate the entity, it effects all of the copies, is that correct?

Yes, but only if you manipulate vertex positions or other mesh geometry. If you resize, change texture, rotate, move etc. with entity commands, it doesn't.

I just Changed over to the CopyEntity command and it's working great. In fact, I added Hundreds of trees to my seen as well with very little impact on my frame rate! Thanks for the advice Bouncer.