confusion with triangle strips / skydome

when i render my skydome i want to use 1 triangle fan (for the top) and a few triangle strips for the rest. Now would it be faster to just always send the fan / strips every frame or do clipping??? and if i do clipping on the skydome i would loose all of my strips and have to do triangles… and i would think that’s something you wouldn’t want to do??

i’m just trying to get more info / feedback on the subject…

anlong with this thought i was trying to come up with a way to get a set of triangle strips to render for my engine for the given scene… but i don’t see how it could work…

my engine that i would like to create would use an octree because it’s primerely outside like mario64… zelda64 etc…

i would think the best way to render is just a vertex array / with a list of visible triangles to draw for the scene… that sound good??

one more thought to get out there… is there any way to make a zelda like engine that renders triangle strips?? i would think if your doing a check on a octant and it’s visible … just send all triangles to be rendered… and don’t worry about triangle strips…

again any help / feedback / thoughts would be great

thankx,
mongoose