[MOC WIP] UCS? - The Punishing One / JumpMaster 5000

[PixelProtectors]

Hello everyone!

I come to you today with something I've been working on for about 2-3 months now. What started out as an effort to make a really nice mid-sized ship turned into quite a challenge haha. My son has really been into bounty hunters lately and I decided to pick a ship. Originally it was going to be Bossk's Hound's Tooth because I have a TON of brown bricks. But I instead decided on Dengar's ship, the Punishing One for some reason. Don't remember why. Anyways... After reviewing a lot of Google images and blueprints of this ship, I wondered if I could attempt something a little bigger. And this thing is definitely going to be big. Considering how large the ship is in the Star Wars universe. I'm not sure if this would qualify as a "UCS" ship... I am certainly no master builder. The biggest concern here is making sure everything connects together (preferably using Technic techniques) so fit the wings on to the main part of the ship and making sure the cockpit works too. All with removable panels for the roof, possibly in sections. Let me know what you think or what suggestions you have. I'm having the most difficulty with the curved cone shape of the nose of the cockpit. I'm not entirely sure how to pull this off so it's not so wobbly? Thanks so much! Sorry for so many images! :P

Oh also - someone else started a thread here about building this ship in 2018, and I didn't realize until much later that our layouts are very similar and we must have been going off of the same blueprints. @Tracytron54321

BELOW: This is everything I have currently completed. In the back you can see the front gun cannons I made.

BELOW: A front shot of the cockpit 

BELOW: The cockpit with Dengar, and the doors currently closed. They do slide open...

BELOW: Same image, but the doors have been opened on a track inside the wall.

BELOW: An above look at the layout of the ship's main area.

BELOW: Dengar's "common area" room with workbench. My son added the helmet. He thought it looked cool :P

BELOW: Opposite the image above, this is the seating area in Dengar's "common area" room.

BELOW: Bathroom area partitioned off with a cape, between Dengar's quarters and the cockpit.

BELOW: Bathroom area displaying a tiny area with a toilet. Hard to see but there's a little sink to the right.

BELOW: Dengar's personal quarters. Not much here.

BELOW: Dengar's personal quarters, door does swing open and shut.

BELOW: It's hard to showcase Dengar's quarters, but there is a bed, a panel on the wall, and a small table.

BELOW: A look at the common area room, coming into the cargo area.

BELOW: Going back into the cargo area now. Seeing some panels and the loading dock built into the floor.

BELOW: A hidden panel on the floor to stow away hidden goods. My own addition.

BELOW: A look at the loading dock and cargo area. Created a panel with gear to grab as he exits the ship.

BELOW: A look at the opposite side of the cargo area, and Dengar's speeder and R5 unit.

BELOW: A look at the engine room I'm still working on. Made the floor grates so you could see pipes through them.

BELOW: A top down look at the pipes through the grates. Need to add engines and walls, etc.

 

[BEAVeR]

Wow, that's going to be a huge project! You have not chosen an easy scale to build this ship when it comes to the outside (I'm especially curious whether you will be able to make the wings stable enough),but it does give you the freedom to build a nice interior and in that area you already shine! I like your choice of color palette. It's very restricted and industrial, which gives a bit of a bleek feeling, which is actually pretty common in Star Wars ships (looking at you, Millennium Falcon!). Maybe to give it a bit of a distinctive flavour, you could also add in some touches of (dark) red. That will go nicely with the exterior and will also make the curtain of the bathroom refresher (which is a very nice technique by the way) jump out less. Not that I imagine Dengar to be a great interior decorator (although you never know, he did put in a nice sofa), but it would add some more visual interest. Another way to add more interest, this time on a level of texture rather than color, would be to break up the monotony of studs on the floor with some tiles here and there. Not everything has to be tiled of course (how are you going to attach figures then?), but you could tile certain areas more, like you did with the refresher area, or you could maybe have a strip of tiles running along the length of the ship like a kind of walkway, or maybe just at the edges with the walls, a bit like how you lined off the hatch with those tiles, which instantly makes it pop!

In any case keep it up with the nice structured distributing of color rather than scattering it about in randomly in tiny blotches to keep things from blending together visually. And definitely keep it up with the great detailing such as in the cockpit (that technique for angling those computer screen just works so nicely!) or in the engine room with those lovely pipes peeking through the grating (I'd love to see even more pipes added to it to give it more depth and detail). You really manage to make those cross sectional drawings of the interior come to life! One thing I do wonder about that drawing and about your creation is how this interior layout can be married with the pronounced notches in the exterior of the hull though? Are you going to build so high over the rooms that you have constructed to allow for those notches in the hull? Are you then also going to add a second floor of interior?

Speaking of the exterior, that's where the real big challenged of a build at this size lie. The thing with LEGO is that it is really easy to build curves at mini scales (tiny parts with intrinsic curvature), midi scales (smaller bows and rounded plates), normal scales (larger compound bows) and super duper huge scales (brick bending, hinging various sections, sculpting). But in between those regular set-sized ships and the really huge creations, which is where your creation is going to drift somewhere, there simply are not that many techniques to create smooth curvature, especially of compound shapes. I think the most frequently used technique is to use hinged panels consisting out of wedges, like used in the Death Star II UCS set back in the day for example. There's really a lot of fitting involved, the results seem to vary in effectiveness, and structural integrety probably won't be all that great. I spent some hours yesterday trying to recreate the shape of the cockpit roughly at the scale you'll be going for with that technique. It was a lot of fun and I spent way more time on it than I had planned, but in the end I didn't really get anything satisfying that would integrate very well into a larger model, I'm afraid.

So my advise would be to more or less follow the technique you've established (working with panels but keeping it mostly square and adding some wedges on top to suggest the shape), althouh you could make it a bit more involved in certain key sections like the nose (here you might be able to fit some compound slopes with some (ball?) hinges). One thing that could definitely make it more easy for you to achieve more or less the right shape, is to drop the requirement of a transparent cockpit. Leaving the glass out will give you a lot more freedom in terms of shape you can pull off because you don't need to fill in the gaps. Alternatively, using black pieces gives you a larger assortment of shapes to choose from which will make it easier to fill in the negative spaces.

It's a big creation so I wrote a lot . Hopefully you find it a bit useful and I'm looking forward to seeing this project evolve over time!

 

 

[Crazy bricks]

Sorry to revive an old topic, but how did this MOC go? Can we see the finished pictures?