[MOC] KdaptPreacher's 1:1455 Fleet --- 206 ships and counting (New: Ahsoka's Shuttle, Fondor Haulcraft)

[Kage Goomba]

He's BACK!

 

<happy dance>

[Kdapt-Preacher]

So this is roughly what Executor's dorsal hull plates ought to look like (although with the caveat that the proportions here will look slightly off since the panels are laying flat rather than angled as they are on the ship). The two panels are each 1626 studs long and have about 2630 pieces (just for one plate layer). I did a lot more math than seems like strictly ought to have been necessary to translate the Battlefront model into a flat panel with appropriate proportions, and apparently I did part of it wrong since the sections here are actually still about three studs wider than they ought to be, but this gives you a feel for the scale and the approximate shape. The way I had been thinking about doing this, with 80x80 panels, turns out not to really make sense given that a) the hull is big but not *that* big and b) I want the greebly lines to be in plane with the axis of flight, as they are on the actual ship. That ends up actually simplifying things a lot, I think, since it reduces the amount of support structure that has to be aligned with the sides of the ship rather than the midline. I'm still going to be working in Excel and Meshmixer for a while, but I feel like I have a coherent plan for this.

[Geihlen]

Ever since you brought up the idea of doing the Executor in this scale, I've been excited about it. Really neat to see some movement/progress with it.

[Kage Goomba]

YAY HES BACK

 

Btw Kdapt - your cantwell class ship is coming to life - new series "Andor" - catch the trailer yet? :)

[Kdapt-Preacher]

1 hour ago, Kage Goomba said:

YAY HES BACK

I never actually leave. I just sometimes have actual work to do (in this case I was doing fieldwork for a month). Can't build LEGOs all the time, unfortunately...

 

1 hour ago, Kage Goomba said:

Btw Kdapt - your cantwell class ship is coming to life - new series "Andor" - catch the trailer yet? :)

I sure did! I'm very excited for it. I loved Rogue One and this show looks like it's going to have a ton of great Imperial content. Just from that shot in the trailer I can already tell I'm going to have to update the Cantwell model (which doesn't surprise me at all given how bad most of the references are--this is the first ever clear shot of the underside of the ship). My preliminary list is that the visible bottom side of the front flange is flat rather than ridged, which probably means it has a rectangular rather than hexagonal cross-section; there's a large turret mounted on the ventral midline; and there's an additional small antenna or other instrument mounted on the portside top of the command tower. It's so far in the background in Solo that it's impossible to say whether these changes are consistent with that depiction (and that could've been an artistic rendering in-universe, anyway), but this is definitely a slightly different version of the ship than the one in Starships and Speeders, so I'll probably keep both versions up. These are all pretty easy changes to make to the model, but we'll have to see whether there are more shots in the actual show--I'd love to get a clearer look at the engine array.

[Kage Goomba]

2 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I never actually leave. I just sometimes have actual work to do (in this case I was doing fieldwork for a month). Can't build LEGOs all the time, unfortunately...

 

I sure did! I'm very excited for it. I loved Rogue One and this show looks like it's going to have a ton of great Imperial content. Just from that shot in the trailer I can already tell I'm going to have to update the Cantwell model (which doesn't surprise me at all given how bad most of the references are--this is the first ever clear shot of the underside of the ship). My preliminary list is that the visible bottom side of the front flange is flat rather than ridged, which probably means it has a rectangular rather than hexagonal cross-section; there's a large turret mounted on the ventral midline; and there's an additional small antenna or other instrument mounted on the portside top of the command tower. It's so far in the background in Solo that it's impossible to say whether these changes are consistent with that depiction (and that could've been an artistic rendering in-universe, anyway), but this is definitely a slightly different version of the ship than the one in Starships and Speeders, so I'll probably keep both versions up. These are all pretty easy changes to make to the model, but we'll have to see whether there are more shots in the actual show--I'd love to get a clearer look at the engine array.

You where away in my eyes XD

If you're not playing with lego's.....

 

Hehehe

 

Looking forward to your updates on the Cantwell Class ship. :)

Also super excited for the Executor

[Kdapt-Preacher]

The Sun Crusher! The infamous Sun Crusher has to be one of the most controversial ships in all of Star Wars. Conceived as an indestructible star-destroying Imperial superweapon, its primary purpose is actually to start online flame wars between starship nerds, to such a degree that on one forum I used to frequent any mention of the ship would get you an immediate 24-hour ban. I have spent the last ten months designing this magnificently detailed model to finally give the ship the UCS treatment it deserves.

After my Sheathipede set people said I could go no lower, but once again I have proven them wrong! This model won't be visible immediately since Rebrickable requires manual admin approval of MOCs under 20 pieces, so you'll have to wait a day or so to see the step-by-step instructions for this incredibly intricate model.

I do also have an actual model to post tomorrow when the renders finish.

 

EDIT: I originally called this model #183, but since I can't actually publish it yet, it'll get a new number later.

Edited August 6, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[Kdapt-Preacher]

Rebrickable has rejected the Sun Crusher for being "too small". This is outrageous. It's unfair! How can it be a superweapon and not be large enough to justify a third piece? But it's also wholly in keeping with my earlier anecdote about the Sun Crusher being entirely banned from discussion on at least one forum. I suppose I'll hang onto this and post it whenever I next do a small Imperial ships set.

[Kage Goomba]

20 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Rebrickable has rejected the Sun Crusher for being "too small". This is outrageous. It's unfair! How can it be a superweapon and not be large enough to justify a third piece? But it's also wholly in keeping with my earlier anecdote about the Sun Crusher being entirely banned from discussion on at least one forum. I suppose I'll hang onto this and post it whenever I next do a small Imperial ships set.

Id have a very long chat with recbrickable - stupid that is. Surely they get its to scale with the rest of your fleet.

[Mr Ogel]

48 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Rebrickable has rejected the Sun Crusher for being "too small". This is outrageous. It's unfair! How can it be a superweapon and not be large enough to justify a third piece?

just make a proper, relaible stand with 18 pieces...instead of the 1*1 bricks take plates and a 3*3 plate with 1*1 tiles as a base...
Okay- that's more supporting the importance of being a superweapon than the ship
Or you can add a crushed sun instead like the famous Alderaan set

[Kdapt-Preacher]

3 hours ago, Kage Goomba said:

Id have a very long chat with recbrickable - stupid that is. Surely they get its to scale with the rest of your fleet.

 

2 hours ago, Mr Ogel said:

just make a proper, relaible stand with 18 pieces...instead of the 1*1 bricks take plates and a 3*3 plate with 1*1 tiles as a base...
Okay- that's more supporting the importance of being a superweapon than the ship
Or you can add a crushed sun instead like the famous Alderaan set

Meh. You guys are right that I could probably get it hosted if I screwed with the model a bit or just pushed the issue with their admins, but it's not like it's a particularly big deal. It'll go up sooner or later, and it's not like you can't see how to make it as it is. And I don't disagree with Rebrickable's stance that they want to have some minimum level of effort to host a MOC. They have a legitimate interest in preventing their platform from being spammed. Honestly, although it's a little elitist of me to say, if anything I think they could probably stand to be a little more stringent about that. The Sun Crusher is justifiable in the sense that it's clearly a legitimate model in the context of this collection and it has a specific reason to be the way it is, but I don't begrudge them rejecting it on those grounds.

 

[Kdapt-Preacher]

OK, the actual #183, the Imperialis! The Imperialis was a Cosinga-class heavy corvette fitted out as a private super-yacht for Emperor Palpatine himself. Although it was filled with luxurious furnishings and accommodations, Palpatine primarily used it as a mobile treasure vault for Sith artifacts. Imperialis was destroyed shortly after the Battle of Yavin after being stolen by Lando Calrissian, but the Emperor kept identical copies in other facilities and they continued to see use throughout the Galactic Civil War.

To be completely honest, I think this is kind of an ugly ship. I like the dark blue, but the red accents don't do anything for me. But I do like the contrast between this and the typical grey Imperial ships; the curves on this one feel more like a callback to Palpatine's Naboo roots, especially with the class presumably being named after Palpatine's father.

[Kage Goomba]

7 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

 

Meh. You guys are right that I could probably get it hosted if I screwed with the model a bit or just pushed the issue with their admins, but it's not like it's a particularly big deal. It'll go up sooner or later, and it's not like you can't see how to make it as it is. And I don't disagree with Rebrickable's stance that they want to have some minimum level of effort to host a MOC. They have a legitimate interest in preventing their platform from being spammed. Honestly, although it's a little elitist of me to say, if anything I think they could probably stand to be a little more stringent about that. The Sun Crusher is justifiable in the sense that it's clearly a legitimate model in the context of this collection and it has a specific reason to be the way it is, but I don't begrudge them rejecting it on those grounds.

 

how many models have you constructed again? and likely all on rebrickable? It's a COLLECTION

It's not like you make a habit of this or abusing the system.

Anyone who knows your MOC's can see this.

That's all I'm saying - its just stupid frankly.

 

Also - love the new one - very nice.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

OK, take two here. #184-186, even more small Imperial ships! Sun Crusher, the Imperial Customs Frigate, and the IPV-1 System Patrol Vehicle. This is probably going to be the last set of small Imperial ships, as I think I've now made essentially all of them that are large enough to render at this scale and small enough to post as a group, which is why this set only has three ships and why it includes the IPV-1, which is a bit larger than the size range for these little things. If I've forgotten about an Imperial ship under, say, 100m long that you still particularly want to see, tell me and I'll see what I can do about adding it to this pack!

[Mandalorianknight]

The sun crusher is the morbius of ships. Take that as you will.

Excellent additions as always.

 

You've got almost every ship I can think of, and then some. Have you done the Darksaber or World Devastators yet? It might be time to just go through wookiepedia and comb through every ship in star wars.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

12 minutes ago, Mandalorianknight said:

You've got almost every ship I can think of, and then some. Have you done the Darksaber or World Devastators yet? It might be time to just go through wookiepedia and comb through every ship in star wars.

A World Devastator is high on my list of stuff to build, since I think that model would look really good, but it's a serious project and I haven't started it yet. The nice thing about them is that since they upgrade themselves there's no set size or specific design, so I have a ton of freedom to do what I want with it. My current thought is to aim at a scale of 800-900 meters or something in that range (i.e., ~50cm long), big enough to be nice and detailed but not ridiculously impractical or expensive to actually build. That would be a midsized Devastator, I think, bigger than the common ones shown in Rogue Squadron but much smaller than Silencer-7 (which would be over two meters long at this scale). My plan is to finish my Venator and Victory before I start that model, but I haven't historically been very good at working on things in the order I intended to, so who knows.

The Darksaber is harder. Its only officially published length is "several kilometers", but the (admittedly very dubiously scaled) artwork seems to imply that its radius is at least a kilometer or so, which would put the length at more like ten or fifteen kilometers, so probably something like ten meters long at this scale, which is definitely not happening. Now, granted, it's probably smaller than Executor and I am working on that, but Executor might have a little more popular appeal...

[Kage Goomba]

17 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

A World Devastator is high on my list of stuff to build, since I think that model would look really good, but it's a serious project and I haven't started it yet. The nice thing about them is that since they upgrade themselves there's no set size or specific design, so I have a ton of freedom to do what I want with it. My current thought is to aim at a scale of 800-900 meters or something in that range (i.e., ~50cm long), big enough to be nice and detailed but not ridiculously impractical or expensive to actually build. That would be a midsized Devastator, I think, bigger than the common ones shown in Rogue Squadron but much smaller than Silencer-7 (which would be over two meters long at this scale). My plan is to finish my Venator and Victory before I start that model, but I haven't historically been very good at working on things in the order I intended to, so who knows.

The Darksaber is harder. Its only officially published length is "several kilometers", but the (admittedly very dubiously scaled) artwork seems to imply that its radius is at least a kilometer or so, which would put the length at more like ten or fifteen kilometers, so probably something like ten meters long at this scale, which is definitely not happening. Now, granted, it's probably smaller than Executor and I am working on that, but Executor might have a little more popular appeal...

I mean - the Darksaber IS just the Death Star's super laser all to itself - its going to be pretty damn large. :)

but I'd be more inclined to see your Executor

[Kdapt-Preacher]

OK, looking for opinions here. I'm poking at a major update to the Quasar Fire to flip the entire bottom of the ship so it doesn't have antistuds showing. I strongly dislike having large sections of exposed antistuds, and especially on a ship like the QF where the bottom is actually in focus since the hangars are such an important feature. The current model mostly is the way it is because it was the first large model I ever designed and I didn't know how to do it better then, but I do now. So the concept I'm playing with has the exact same dimensions as the current version, and is externally almost identical on all surfaces except that the whole bottom of the ship is now studs-out, which I think is a major improvement overall. But there are multiple downsides:
1. The interiors of the hangars don't look nearly as good. The floors are now composed of inverted tiles rather than regular tiles, so they're still smooth and black as they should be, but the 1x3 inverted tile has an unsightly hole in the middle of it. And the various small hangar accessories that I had before, the TIE gantries and such, are much less convenient now that they don't have studs to sit on.
2. The build is significantly more complex, and uses somewhat rarer pieces. Nothing terribly unusual, but the black tiles and 6x10 plates it used before were things that a lot of folks would already have on hand, whereas the inverted tiles aren't as common.
3. The stand is going to be uglier, since it isn't going to just be a stud-antistud connection. It'll have to have another inversion in there. Which, granted, plenty of my models already have.
4. It may be slightly less structurally sound? I'm away from my parts collection, so I can't test-build it for a few days. I think it'll be fine, but complexity breeds flexibility, as they say...

This is what we're looking at (old on the left, new on the right):

So my question is, does this seem like a good trade to you? On one hand presumably most people will spend most of their time looking at the outside of the model, so that should probably be the priority, but on the other hand the interactivity of having 'functional' hangars here is important to me, and I feel like that's a strong selling point of the model. Is this a big enough improvement to the exterior to be worth compromising that a little bit? Do you not care at all about the hangars, or not care at all about the antistuds in the first place, or have another opinion?

[Kage Goomba]

3 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

OK, looking for opinions here. I'm poking at a major update to the Quasar Fire to flip the entire bottom of the ship so it doesn't have antistuds showing. I strongly dislike having large sections of exposed antistuds, and especially on a ship like the QF where the bottom is actually in focus since the hangars are such an important feature. The current model mostly is the way it is because it was the first large model I ever designed and I didn't know how to do it better then, but I do now. So the concept I'm playing with has the exact same dimensions as the current version, and is externally almost identical on all surfaces except that the whole bottom of the ship is now studs-out, which I think is a major improvement overall. But there are multiple downsides:
1. The interiors of the hangars don't look nearly as good. The floors are now composed of inverted tiles rather than regular tiles, so they're still smooth and black as they should be, but the 1x3 inverted tile has an unsightly hole in the middle of it. And the various small hangar accessories that I had before, the TIE gantries and such, are much less convenient now that they don't have studs to sit on.
2. The build is significantly more complex, and uses somewhat rarer pieces. Nothing terribly unusual, but the black tiles and 6x10 plates it used before were things that a lot of folks would already have on hand, whereas the inverted tiles aren't as common.
3. The stand is going to be uglier, since it isn't going to just be a stud-antistud connection. It'll have to have another inversion in there. Which, granted, plenty of my models already have.
4. It may be slightly less structurally sound? I'm away from my parts collection, so I can't test-build it for a few days. I think it'll be fine, but complexity breeds flexibility, as they say...

This is what we're looking at (old on the left, new on the right):

So my question is, does this seem like a good trade to you? On one hand presumably most people will spend most of their time looking at the outside of the model, so that should probably be the priority, but on the other hand the interactivity of having 'functional' hangars here is important to me, and I feel like that's a strong selling point of the model. Is this a big enough improvement to the exterior to be worth compromising that a little bit? Do you not care at all about the hangars, or not care at all about the antistuds in the first place, or have another opinion?

The new one is better honestly - but I'm a sucker for detail. Cept that lest set of pics confuses me. Explain difference position?

Edited August 13, 2022 by Kage Goomba

[m4st3rt3ch]

8 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

So my question is, does this seem like a good trade to you? 

Yes.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

8 hours ago, Kage Goomba said:

The new one is better honestly - but I'm a sucker for detail. Cept that lest set of pics confuses me. Explain difference position?

\

The positioning makes it a bit hard to see, especially since Stud.io's renderer really hates illuminating interior areas. The goal was to show off the differences in the hangars. The new one on the left isn't as smooth inside; it's got holes in the center two bays, and a divot in the very center on each side of the panel divider.

3 hours ago, m4st3rt3ch said:

Yes.

Thank you.

[Kage Goomba]

4 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

\

The positioning makes it a bit hard to see, especially since Stud.io's renderer really hates illuminating interior areas. The goal was to show off the differences in the hangars. The new one on the left isn't as smooth inside; it's got holes in the center two bays, and a divot in the very center on each side of the panel divider.

Thank you.

Well the left one looks good - any chance of applying the left side to the right side which is better overall?

[Kdapt-Preacher]

2 hours ago, Kage Goomba said:

Well the left one looks good - any chance of applying the left side to the right side which is better overall?

Ack, sorry, I said that backwards. The one on the left is the original and the one on the right is the new version. Unfortunately I don't see any way to get the best of both worlds in the space I have here. The whole bottom of the ship is only two plates thick, with the floor of the hangars and the bottom hull layer mutually supporting each other. If their studs are facing in opposite directions there'd have to be two more layers in the middle, I think. At least I don't know of any way around that.

I'll continue ruminating on this for a couple of days, and build it physically to see how it holds up. I think this is probably a net positive change, since a) the exterior of the ship has to be more important that the insides of the hangars and b) I think the improvement to the exterior is greater than the worsening of the interior, so odds are that this'll get published next week, but we'll see.

[Kage Goomba]

3 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Ack, sorry, I said that backwards. The one on the left is the original and the one on the right is the new version. Unfortunately I don't see any way to get the best of both worlds in the space I have here. The whole bottom of the ship is only two plates thick, with the floor of the hangars and the bottom hull layer mutually supporting each other. If their studs are facing in opposite directions there'd have to be two more layers in the middle, I think. At least I don't know of any way around that.

I'll continue ruminating on this for a couple of days, and build it physically to see how it holds up. I think this is probably a net positive change, since a) the exterior of the ship has to be more important that the insides of the hangars and b) I think the improvement to the exterior is greater than the worsening of the interior, so odds are that this'll get published next week, but we'll see.

Honestly its not that big of a deal - but at the same time I know alllll too well the dilemma your dealing with lol.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

WIP of Hondo Ohnaka's Acushnet, which is probably going to be the next large model I post. This is WIP because there's still work to do on the internal structure, but I think this is about what the exterior is going to look like (I may change some plates to tiles or similar, but this is approximately it). It'll probably end up having slightly more pieces than the Quasar Fire and Immobilizer, but it's not nearly as complex as they are structurally.

I haven't made up my mind about the Flarestars yet. I kinda like the idea of having smaller ships physically attached to the larger model, especially since that's consistent with how 75252 does it, but I feel like I'm never quite sold on how they look in practice. I might post the model with the Flarestars on separate stands rather than with the transparent antennae. Another thing to ruminate on...