Hi Tim, no this is not possible. You can boolean difference something that is not touching if the object to be differenced is completely inside of the other one forming a cavity.

But you can't union together 2 different objects into one single object.

In version 2.0 I expect to have some other kind of grouping mechanism (other than boolean union) to make it possible to select objects as a set, but for V1 there won't be any automatic way to do this.

- Michael