Kdapt-Preacher Posted August 2, 2025 Author Posted August 2, 2025 OK, update on the photos: Apparently Imgur detected an unspecified violation of their content policy on my account, which hadn't uploaded any pictures in the previous six months, and they reacted to that by deleting everything I'd ever posted there without even so much as notifying me that it had happened. Their support people are unable to tell me what the alleged violation was or how to prevent it in the future, and they say they're unable to recover any of the removed content, and effectively that if I have a problem with that I should megabluck off and die. (And then week after this conversation they sent me a spam email celebrating the tenth anniversary of my creating the account.) So I have deleted my Imgur account, and I would very strongly encourage anyone else who's using them to back up all your stuff and then find a different image hosting service. I've restored the main render on the first post of this thread, but I'll have to see about replacing all the other image links; I imagine I still have most of those files saved locally in various places, but it'd be a huge pain to have to track them all down again. Quote
Calanon Posted March 16 Posted March 16 I want to try adapting the MC30c to be an MC40a light cruiser. I am utterly stuck on how to do the raised bits on the slope at this scale. Does anyone have any suggestions? Quote
Kdapt-Preacher Posted March 17 Author Posted March 17 12 hours ago, Calanon said: I want to try adapting the MC30c to be an MC40a light cruiser. I am utterly stuck on how to do the raised bits on the slope at this scale. Does anyone have any suggestions? That's going to be a pretty rough conversion. The MC40a is a much larger ship than the MC30c, about 50% longer and proportionately wider; and even if you were fudging the scale so your model was the same length as the original one, the shape is different enough that you're going to end up rebuilding basically the entire thing. To be properly to scale with this model, the MC40a should be in about 10 studs wide on the front part with the raised bits, and 18 or 20 studs wide on the rear half (rough ballpark, I haven't drawn out the diagram, so do the actual math before relying on that), which gives you a lot more room to play with. That's big enough that you can put a hinge plate in there and do whatever you want with it. Quote
Calanon Posted March 17 Posted March 17 1 hour ago, Kdapt-Preacher said: That's going to be a pretty rough conversion. The MC40a is a much larger ship than the MC30c, about 50% longer and proportionately wider; and even if you were fudging the scale so your model was the same length as the original one, the shape is different enough that you're going to end up rebuilding basically the entire thing. To be properly to scale with this model, the MC40a should be in about 10 studs wide on the front part with the raised bits, and 18 or 20 studs wide on the rear half (rough ballpark, I haven't drawn out the diagram, so do the actual math before relying on that), which gives you a lot more room to play with. That's big enough that you can put a hinge plate in there and do whatever you want with it. Yes, I ended up realising a few hours after posting. I had been basing it on this part of the Wookieepedia article: "and the MC40a's clamshell-like keel was the same as the MC30C Frigate" as well as the picture on the article. Not sure if the Mel Miniatures model is a canonical appearance but I found that this morning and it's more like the heavy cruisers. There's no concrete length as even for Legends it says between 500m and 600m. The Mel Miniatures one also had the variance in width vs the other image looking almost straight. I will try and do something as I want a mini fleet but building in this scale is definitely something I'm not good at! Quote
Kdapt-Preacher Posted March 17 Author Posted March 17 23 minutes ago, Calanon said: Yes, I ended up realising a few hours after posting. I had been basing it on this part of the Wookieepedia article: "and the MC40a's clamshell-like keel was the same as the MC30C Frigate" as well as the picture on the article. Not sure if the Mel Miniatures model is a canonical appearance but I found that this morning and it's more like the heavy cruisers. There's no concrete length as even for Legends it says between 500m and 600m. The Mel Miniatures one also had the variance in width vs the other image looking almost straight. I will try and do something as I want a mini fleet but building in this scale is definitely something I'm not good at! Mel Miniatures does good research and is viable as a source in cases where few good official images exist. For some ships with little information available they've occasionally made interpolations that I don't agree with, but that's more a question of personal taste in most cases. For the MC40a, since it originated in a video game there is an official canon (well, Legends, but you know what I mean) 3D model to get the proportions from. The pics on the Wookieepedia page for the ship class aren't very good, but there are better angles on other articles; here's a good clear top view: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lulsla_(MC40a_light_cruiser)?file=Lulsla.jpg The quality of the model is about what you'd expect from a game that came out in 1994, though, so you have a lot of wiggle room there to interpret what few details there are. Also, that whole series is pretty liberal about ship designs compared to higher-resolution sources (check out what their Nebulon-B frigates look like as an example), so even specific stuff like the engine placements could be moved around a fair bit without losing the spirit of the thing, especially since the drawing in Starships and Speeders looks almost nothing like the game version (and Starships and Speeders has some serious problems of its own; a lot of its images are very loose interpretations of the source material). 500-600 meters is a decent range for what it is, but keep in mind too that a lot of Mon Cala ships are individually built rather than identical series, so it's totally possible that there are a range of sizes and configurations for different ships all falling under the general class "MC40a". It adds up to a lot of flexibility for you to play with scales and techniques until you land on something you're satisfied with. Quote
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