DonAngelico Posted July 22 Posted July 22 Hello there! I’d like to warmly invite you to take a look at my MOC. It’s now available online on Rebrickable. I invite you to check out the page and have a closer look at the MOC and its description. I’ll be posting a few pictures and I’m currently rendering more images – but my computer is taking forever, so it’s going to take a little while.
betaplayer Posted July 23 Posted July 23 Nice work, really captures the sleek look of it, and the color choice is accurate imo. But isn't it too big to be minifigure scaled though?
DonAngelico Posted July 23 Author Posted July 23 Hi, and thanks for your message! Yes, you’re right — it’s a bit larger than what you might expect if you go strictly by the data you’d find on, say, Jedipedia. But honestly, those sources aren’t all that logical either. Most of the information comes from scattered mentions in Legends material — especially from the older Thrawn books — and has been pieced together from there. So a lot of it is speculative or imaginative, which is great! That kind of fan-fiction is what gave this model life in the first place and helped shape its identity. There’s no official depiction or blueprint of the Clawcraft, so everything we have comes from fan creations. While working on the design, I noticed a few things — from an aerospace and spacecraft design perspective — that didn’t quite make sense. For example, the wings. Those oval “claws” are just too small to be tactically useful in the way they’re often drawn. So I extended them a bit. Instead of being perfectly circular, the wings are more elongated and stretched forward, in the direction of attack — toward the four synchronized laser cannons. The goal was to have the wings shield as much of the cockpit as possible from the front, with just minimal angle adjustments — essentially to obscure the cockpit entirely from incoming fire. That’s the functional idea behind the shape. I also reworked the laser cannons themselves, turning them into something more like Polestar cannons — meaning they use a focusing lens to amplify their firepower into fewer, more concentrated shots, rather than rapid-fire blasts. The wings are indeed larger, but the central sphere — the cockpit module — is exactly to scale. It’s actually based on the UCS TIE Fighter canopy dish (the only 8x8 printed dome of its kind), which fits perfectly. The rest of the proportions were carefully adjusted — for example, the impulse engine at the rear. I made it a bit more powerful-looking, since the Clawcraft is supposed to have a Class 1.5 hyperdrive. Some reference images show the engine that way; others show it smaller, so I went with the version that felt right to me. About the plates below the cannons — on some fan-art they’re drawn really large. Honestly, I don’t fully get what they’re meant to be. But here’s my theory: since the Clawcraft features a very large cockpit canopy and is clearly designed for high visibility, it wouldn’t make sense to have the pilot blinded by their own synchronized laser flashes every time they fire. So I added mirrored plates beneath the cannons to reflect light away from the cockpit — especially useful in dark space environments to avoid blinding glare. That way, the pilot keeps clear vision while firing. The access hatch on top — the dome — works really well. The proportions are spot on. As I said, the only really scaled-up part is the wings. And that ties into the landing configuration. The Clawcraft can’t just land like a TIE Fighter. TIEs usually dock in clamps, but if they land flat, they rest on their flat wings. That doesn’t work with round, curved wings like these. And since the Clawcraft is native to icy worlds and operates under different doctrines — including its hyperdrive capability — it needs to be able to land securely anywhere. So I added a landing mode: the wings rotate, and the rear impulse/ion drive extends downward, stabilizing the ship for landing on uneven surfaces. That way, the pilot isn’t precariously balancing the ship or watching it roll away on its curved hull. So yes, it might look large in some renders, but when you compare the wing size to the cockpit and the pilot’s position, I think the aesthetic proportions work really well. I actually used the golden ratio (Fibonacci sequence) to guide the wing curvature, aligning the arcs with a hyperbolic swing to keep things elegant and visually balanced. It’s been carefully refined. Honestly, I’d love it if someone took the time to incorporate this kind of thought process into an artwork or illustration. I’m not much of a visual artist myself — it took me ages just to build the figures. Doing a full artwork or schematic is a bit out of reach for me… but maybe someone out there will take an interest. In any case, thanks again for reaching out! If you’ve got feedback or follow-up questions, I’m always happy to chat. And I hope you didn’t fall asleep reading all of this 😄
Jim Posted July 23 Posted July 23 Hi, If you post a topic here, please embed pictures and provide some information in the topic etc. Don't just simply link to an external website. I will close this topic.
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