SFS TIE/sa Bomber

[Jerac]

Next TIE craft in the line! 

The Bomber is one of my favourite designs in the lineup. Interceptor is nice, the standard T/F is somewhat boring and featureless, but the bomber is visibly a workhorse of the fleet. It is heavy, rugged and pragmatic as possible, with no regard placed when it comes to its look. In the end you get a ship which is totally distinct and what is rare in Star Wars world, assymetric. Who wouldn't like such a design?

What was surprising for me was how heavy the ship is compared to other TIEs. It uses almost twice the part count to the standard T/F, and yet it is similar in size. The build was fun but not super challenging, there were just few complex areas: coning shape of the hulls' fronts and bottoms, engines, bomb bay, center hull joiner, having the hulls proper diameter.... okay, perhaps this is few things to consider :D

Lets get to that which matters - the design!
I hope you like it as much as I did the design!

 

...and there is a video, too! :D

The ship is a commisioned build and as such, has instructions available!
https://www.brickvault.toys/collections/all

[sandtrooper]

I agree about the design of the ship.  It has been one of my favorite imperial ships from the OT.  Really like your design for the bomber.

How many pieces are in the final build?  Thanks.

[Artizan]

the shaping is great and I really like the photography with the lighting setting that makes it is taken in outer space!

[Ellisss_2]

Looks awesome, fantastic detailing and I love the scale!

[Jerac]

Thanks!

 

6 hours ago, sandtrooper said:

I agree about the design of the ship.  It has been one of my favorite imperial ships from the OT.  Really like your design for the bomber.

How many pieces are in the final build?  Thanks.

About 1450. Nothing particularly rare, but plenty of duplicates... a total of 200 of 1x2 and 1x1 alone, for example.

[TemjinStrife]

14 minutes ago, Jerac said:

Thanks!

 

About 1450. Nothing particularly rare, but plenty of duplicates... a total of 200 of 1x2 and 1x1 alone, for example.

Wow, that's almost UCS numbers in a minifig scale model!

[stormtroopercaptain]

Super excited I’ve already been collecting parts for the orginal and the interceptor. I’ll be adding this to the list. 

[atlas]

Nice idea to put the curved slopes side on to fill the gap  on the truncated cone sections on the front and back of the hulls. How did you attach those, mini ball joint, clip, something else?

[Jerac]

4 hours ago, atlas said:

Nice idea to put the curved slopes side on to fill the gap  on the truncated cone sections on the front and back of the hulls. How did you attach those, mini ball joint, clip, something else?

Clips and pneumatic T-pieces; the attachment points for these "gap fillers" is actually quite far back into the build. This was perhaps the very first thing I have designed for this ship and boy did it cause problems... :D
So the weird hulls' diameter? 8-wide would be much simplier, right? And it would! Except I couldn't get these "fillers" to work with 8-wide so instead of doing something else with them I just adjusted entire ship's hulls' width... so total dimensions of this model were determined by a combination of one 1x2 slope, one clip, one 1x2 plate and one T-piece.

[atlas]

3 hours ago, Jerac said:

Clips and pneumatic T-pieces; the attachment points for these "gap fillers" is actually quite far back into the build. This was perhaps the very first thing I have designed for this ship and boy did it cause problems... :D
So the weird hulls' diameter? 8-wide would be much simplier, right? And it would! Except I couldn't get these "fillers" to work with 8-wide so instead of doing something else with them I just adjusted entire ship's hulls' width... so total dimensions of this model were determined by a combination of one 1x2 slope, one clip, one 1x2 plate and one T-piece.

Interesting, I think it worked out quite well and looks especially good in favourable lighting. What scale did you decide on - did you start with a predetermined length and width according to a general standard or is it specific just to this build? I've decided to go with 4 studs to a metre for my future projects, quite big but i think still reasonable - it comes out to 1:31.25, so essentially 1:32. It seems like this is made to 0.3 metres per stud, is that right?

[Jerac]

Generally I scale to any element I can get right first. For example I know a TIE cockpit windshield part is 6-wide so I scale everything to this cockpit diameter using Sariel's scaling tool. I never scale to metres because there exists no good data on dimensions of Star Wars vehicles (official does not mean good by any means!). And then even if there was, the minifig is awfully out of proportions and properly scaled ship would probably not fit a minifig inside.

When I was building standard TIE fighters, I made the sphere to be roughly 8.5 studs in diameter and scaled everything to match this dimension. Here it was the cockpit piece with the coning assembly, and in the A-wing I was scaling to the engines' diameter.

[Forresto]

I've built your tie fighter and now that you've made the Tie Bomber I will have to jump on building this as Lego will never do better. Now I have to see if it's on rebrickable!

Great showing! So happy right now! 

[Jerac]

Eventually it will be, but it is already on brickvault.toys

[Schneeds]

Perfect scale, and I don't know that it's possible to do a better job.  I will definitely be building this; it will go perfectly with my self designed tie. 

Any plans on doing a Vader's Tie Advanced?  I'm most curious to see how you would go about it. 

[Martini26]

Wonderful playset model like all others from your hand ;)

[Jerac]

Thanks!

 

9 hours ago, Schneeds said:

Perfect scale, and I don't know that it's possible to do a better job.  I will definitely be building this; it will go perfectly with my self designed tie. 

Any plans on doing a Vader's Tie Advanced?  I'm most curious to see how you would go about it. 

I am actually working on it since some time. Ideally it should be published along with standard TIEs to make a trench run but... well, things did not end up being ideal. So far I went through three prototypes and I don't like any one of them enough to be finalized. I tend to design many builds simultaneously so while I am tinkering with the T/A, it is possible that another ship ends up being finished before. The biggest problem for me is lack of good source material. There are plenty of photos of a T/A studio ILM model, but every single of them has very strong perspective which makes taking measurements difficult. I tried, but model built with that data ended up looking "just weird" which is a sure signal something is off. Since I accept only what I consider absolute perfection, I will publish the T/A only if it is as good as possible.

Edited March 27, 2018 by Jerac

[Riotvale]

I've built the other two TIE's in your series and enjoyed every second of it. I am looking forward to sitting down sometime in the near future and starting the bomber. I only need to acquire a few more parts, and as such here is a question:

Regarding the 1x2 jumper (x43) required, is there a difference between these two for this build?

(TYPE A) https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3794b&C=86#T=S&C=86&O={"color":"86","ss":"CA","rpp":"500","iconly":0}  

and

(TYPE B) https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=15573#T=S&O={"ss":"CA","rpp":"500","iconly":0}

Jumper B is much much easier (and cheaper) to acquire, and the only difference i can ascertain is that one has a bottom stud holder, and one does not.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, and thanks for the amazing MOCS.

[Jerac]

In this build there is no difference between jumper pieces. You can use whichever you want. Thanks for pointing out that one variant is significantly cheaper than the other one, I will have that in mind next time I publish instructions.

So far the only ship requiring very specific piece subtype was the interceptor with its odd headlight-to-clip technique, which uses these:
Plate, Modified 1 x 1 with Clip Vertical - Type 2 (thin U clip)

Any other variant won't work because it won't fit into headlight backside.

[TemjinStrife]

There are a few other substitutions that can be made cheaper. For example, the 1x1 modified tile with vertical clips are much cheaper as the "rounded edges" version; similarly, the versions of 1x1 modified plates with clips (vertical and horizontal) with "Thick Open O" are often much cheaper than Thick U or other variants.

(this is why it is sometimes helpful to build in stud.io, as it can pull Bricklink average pricing for parts).

[Jerac]

stud.io has some problems... first being license which says anything uploaded to it becomes property of bricklink, second being the fact it crashes on importing anything bigger than 100 pcs on all machines I tried ;p

[TemjinStrife]

2 hours ago, Jerac said:

stud.io has some problems... first being license which says anything uploaded to it becomes property of bricklink, second being the fact it crashes on importing anything bigger than 100 pcs on all machines I tried ;p

It's definitely got stability problems at times!

Re: license, is that just for things you actually upload to Bricklink, or is it everything you build with stud.io even if you don't upload to BL?

[Forresto]

On 3/26/2018 at 1:03 PM, Jerac said:

Eventually it will be, but it is already on brickvault.toys

Ahh okay.

I might buy the instructions but I'm gping to wait to build when the list of stores with the percentage of pieces is up.

It makes these builds so much easier 

[Jerac]

You will get pdf and xml for bricklink from brickvault too. 

 

53 minutes ago, TemjinStrife said:

It's definitely got stability problems at times!

Re: license, is that just for things you actually upload to Bricklink, or is it everything you build with stud.io even if you don't upload to BL?

To be honest, I am not sure. But I think it is so shady I won't risk using the software at all.

[TemjinStrife]

8 hours ago, Jerac said:

You will get pdf and xml for bricklink from brickvault too. 

 

To be honest, I am not sure. But I think it is so shady I won't risk using the software at all.

To be fair, if they didn't have that, they could get sued by people who upload to their online functionality.

[Riotvale]

 

 

Finally finished building the entire family of TIE's. Thanks Jerac for the amazing work you put into designing these, and I look forward to the next one. For now, I have to find some nice Rebel ships (X,Y, A Wings) to accompany these beauties. If anyone know of any outstanding professional MOC's, I'm game!

https://imgur.com/a/VSHQo

 

 

Edited April 17, 2018 by Riotvale