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

[Kdapt-Preacher]

2 hours ago, Samppu said:

Wow, I would be really curious to hear about this! Like in general did he introduce the concept of the ship personally (I guess so?) or alternatively was it accepted or maybe even introduced by the Lucasarts or someone else first, or did he just imagine the concept and then someone else tried to give it a picture, how it should look like.

- Samppu

I thought we should move this out of MandalorianKnight's thread, since it doesn't have anything to do with his model, but for everybody else this is a continuation of a conversation about establishing the scale of the Springhawk that started here. 

Zahn did introduce the ship itself, back in the old EU when Lucasfilm gave the authors had a lot more freedom to play around with anything set well outside the movie era. The Springhawk specifically first appeared as Thrawn's flagship in Outbound Flight in 2006, but the general idea that the Chiss have a government and therefore presumably a navy of some sort is at least a couple years older than that, and in some sense it might even predate the EU itself, depending on how much of Thrawn's backstory Zahn already had in mind when he was writing Heir to the Empire in 1991. But Chiss ships just happened never to appear in any illustrated media before that one Thrawn comic in 2018; they were always only covered in novels, and they weren't figured prominently enough to make it into any of the Essential Guides to Vehicles or similar sources that illustrated some of the other EU stuff of that era. I'd also be curious to hear where the comic illustrator got that specific shape, though, since Zahn tends not to provide very detailed descriptions of technical stuff like that (which is probably a sensible policy generally, I guess). It's completely possible that the illustrator just made up something that would be consistent with the description given in the book, but it also wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the last twenty years Zahn himself had made a back-of-a-napkin sketch of his vision of a Chiss ship for the benefit of another author or something, since they appeared in the NJO collaborative project and they'd have wanted to keep the descriptions consistent. I have no idea. He's doing a Star Wars panel at DragonCon on Saturday, so I'll ask him about it if I get a chance. Last DragonCon I moderated a panel with him about the Chiss government, which would've been the perfect opportunity to talk about it, but alas, that was a year ago, and we're not doing anything that specific this year. But I'll see what I can do.

[natesroom]

the most extensive and earliest information given about thrawn and the chiss would be covered in the Heir to the Empire/Dark Force Rising/Last Command RPG sourcebooks by West End games 1992. The most extensive of the chiss in novel information would be the Hand of Thrawn Duology 1997.

Edited August 31, 2022 by natesroom

[Kdapt-Preacher]

12 minutes ago, natesroom said:

the most extensive and earliest information given about thrawn and the chiss would be covered in the Heir to the Empire/Dark Force Rising/Last Command RPG sourcebooks by West End games 1992. The most extensive of the chiss in novel information would be the Hand of Thrawn Duology 1997.

Those Sourcebooks are great and they've got some really nice early illustrations of a lot of Imperial stuff, including a shot of the rare two-well Interdictor variant that mostly stopped showing up after about 1995, but unfortunately there's nothing in them about Chiss ships. There's basically nothing about the Chiss themselves in the original Thrawn trilogy at all; they didn't get into Thrawn's backstory until later. Even in the Hand of Thrawn duology they didn't even get into Chiss space until Vision. You see a lot more of the Chiss in Outbound Flight, but nothing in the EU ever went into remotely as much detail as the recent Ascendancy trilogy. That's the first time we've ever had any real insight into what life in the Ascendancy or the larger CEDF looks like outside of just Thrawn's forces and their few appearances in Dark Nest and the like.

[Samppu]

8 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I thought we should move this out of MandalorianKnight's thread, since it doesn't have anything to do with his model, but for everybody else this is a continuation of a conversation about establishing the scale of the Springhawk that started here. 

Zahn did introduce the ship itself, back in the old EU when Lucasfilm gave the authors had a lot more freedom to play around with anything set well outside the movie era. The Springhawk specifically first appeared as Thrawn's flagship in Outbound Flight in 2006, but the general idea that the Chiss have a government and therefore presumably a navy of some sort is at least a couple years older than that, and in some sense it might even predate the EU itself, depending on how much of Thrawn's backstory Zahn already had in mind when he was writing Heir to the Empire in 1991. But Chiss ships just happened never to appear in any illustrated media before that one Thrawn comic in 2018; they were always only covered in novels, and they weren't figured prominently enough to make it into any of the Essential Guides to Vehicles or similar sources that illustrated some of the other EU stuff of that era. I'd also be curious to hear where the comic illustrator got that specific shape, though, since Zahn tends not to provide very detailed descriptions of technical stuff like that (which is probably a sensible policy generally, I guess). It's completely possible that the illustrator just made up something that would be consistent with the description given in the book, but it also wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the last twenty years Zahn himself had made a back-of-a-napkin sketch of his vision of a Chiss ship for the benefit of another author or something, since they appeared in the NJO collaborative project and they'd have wanted to keep the descriptions consistent. I have no idea. He's doing a Star Wars panel at DragonCon on Saturday, so I'll ask him about it if I get a chance. Last DragonCon I moderated a panel with him about the Chiss government, which would've been the perfect opportunity to talk about it, but alas, that was a year ago, and we're not doing anything that specific this year. But I'll see what I can do.

Very interesting, thank you for explaining this!

- Samppu

[Kdapt-Preacher]

OK, here's my announcement: I am delighted to report that, courtesy of the excellent ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk, there are now custom UCS stickers available for several of my models!

I think these plaques look great, if I do say so myself (I say that as if I had anything to do with them---ultimatecollectorstickers did 100% of the work of making the plaques; all I contributed was the Stud.io file of the models). I've always been a little bit torn about UCS plaques, honestly, since I do like the cleanness of a minimalist stand that lets the model stand on its own (so to speak), but now that I've seen these with the plaques I definitely think it kicks them up a notch.

Instructions for the updated versions of the stands are now available on those models' Rebrickable pages (the non-plaque versions are still available as well), and the stickers are all available from ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk for £2.25 apiece. To be clear, in case this is important to anyone, I'm still not making any money off of this, as I prefer to keep my MOC building strictly as a hobby; I'm not involved in the sale of the stickers at all other than having made the original MOCs, and the payment goes wholly to ultimatecollectorstickers to cover having them physically printed. But I'd definitely rather support ultimatecollectorstickers than those guys in China who are illegally selling knockoff kits of my models, so I'm glad that at least some of the potential money to be made here will go to somebody I like. :)

EDIT: Also, eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the Class Four Container Transport now has screen-accurate colored cargo containers, since while I was doing this I realized that those ingot pieces have been introduced in dark orange and sand blue in the time since I originally designed the model! The instructions for that model are very complicated and involve multiple rounds of rendering, so I haven't posted that update yet anywhere other than in this one render, but it'll go up after DragonCon.

Edited September 3, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[Kage Goomba]

11 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

OK, here's my announcement: I am delighted to report that, courtesy of the excellent ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk, there are now custom UCS stickers available for several of my models!

I think these plaques look great, if I do say so myself (I say that as if I had anything to do with them---ultimatecollectorstickers did 100% of the work of making the plaques; all I contributed was the Stud.io file of the models). I've always been a little bit torn about UCS plaques, honestly, since I do like the cleanness of a minimalist stand that lets the model stand on its own (so to speak), but now that I've seen these with the plaques I definitely think it kicks them up a notch.

Instructions for the updated versions of the stands are now available on those models' Rebrickable pages (the non-plaque versions are still available as well), and the stickers are all available from ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk for £2.25 apiece. To be clear, in case this is important to anyone, I'm still not making any money off of this, as I prefer to keep my MOC building strictly as a hobby; I'm not involved in the sale of the stickers at all other than having made the original MOCs, and the payment goes wholly to ultimatecollectorstickers to cover having them physically printed. But I'd definitely rather support ultimatecollectorstickers than those guys in China who are illegally selling knockoff kits of my models, so I'm glad that at least some of the potential money to be made here will go to somebody I like. :)

EDIT: Also, eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the Class Four Container Transport now has screen-accurate colored cargo containers, since while I was doing this I realized that those ingot pieces have been introduced in dark orange and sand blue in the time since I originally designed the model! The instructions for that model are very complicated and involve multiple rounds of rendering, so I haven't posted that update yet anywhere other than in this one render, but it'll go up after DragonCon.

Fantastic work as always.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

On 8/31/2022 at 5:25 AM, Samppu said:

Very interesting, thank you for explaining this!

- Samppu

I did talk to Tim Zahn about it today, and he says he has no idea how big it is. He says that when he's writing he categorizes ships by 'tier' so he has a sense of relative power levels and what should match up with what, but he doesn't translate that to size in any way that would be useful to us unless he has a specific reason to. But he also said that on reflection he wasn't certain he hadn't already done that, since it did interact with Imperial ships in one of the novels, and that he would look at his notes and get back to me if he found it written down somewhere. So, maybe?

[Kage Goomba]

10 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I did talk to Tim Zahn about it today, and he says he has no idea how big it is. He says that when he's writing he categorizes ships by 'tier' so he has a sense of relative power levels and what should match up with what, but he doesn't translate that to size in any way that would be useful to us unless he has a specific reason to. But he also said that on reflection he wasn't certain he hadn't already done that, since it did interact with Imperial ships in one of the novels, and that he would look at his notes and get back to me if he found it written down somewhere. So, maybe?

Wait..you spoke to Timothy Zahn?

I'm so terribly jealous right now lol.

Should show him my TIE Defender lol

[Kdapt-Preacher]

1 hour ago, Kage Goomba said:

Wait..you spoke to Timothy Zahn?

I'm so terribly jealous right now lol.

Should show him my TIE Defender lol

I’m a volunteer for the Star Wars track at DragonCon. One of the upsides of that is that, one weekend per year, I can basically just walk up to most of the SW authors and ask them random questions. :)  This year we had Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, Delilah S. Dawson, Michael Stackpole, Claudia Grey, Greg Keyes, and John Jackson Miller, but nearly all of the prominent ones have come at least once.

Edited September 4, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[natesroom]

Kevin, Zahn and Stackpole are my favorite...

[Kage Goomba]

4 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I’m a volunteer for the Star Wars track at DragonCon. One of the upsides of that is that, one weekend per year, I can basically just walk up to most of the SW authors and ask them random questions. :)  This year we had Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, Delilah S. Dawson, Michael Stackpole, Claudia Grey, Greg Keyes, and John Jackson Miller, but nearly all of the prominent ones have come at least once.

I'd love to spend 5 minutes with the guy....id die a happy goomba.

[Mandalorianknight]

18 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I did talk to Tim Zahn about it today, and he says he has no idea how big it is. He says that when he's writing he categorizes ships by 'tier' so he has a sense of relative power levels and what should match up with what, but he doesn't translate that to size in any way that would be useful to us unless he has a specific reason to. But he also said that on reflection he wasn't certain he hadn't already done that, since it did interact with Imperial ships in one of the novels, and that he would look at his notes and get back to me if he found it written down somewhere. So, maybe?

That's actually really interesting just in general. I've always thought of Mr. Zahn as basically just Thrawn for some reason, so it's kind of funny to hear him say he doesn't know something.

2 hours ago, Kage Goomba said:

I'd love to spend 5 minutes with the guy....id die a happy goomba.

Wait, are you not already a happy goomba via your PFP? Has that smile been one not of happiness, but barely contained rage this whole time?

[Kdapt-Preacher]

3 hours ago, Kage Goomba said:

I'd love to spend 5 minutes with the guy....id die a happy goomba.

You should come to DragonCon some time. That kind of thing can be arranged.

1 hour ago, Mandalorianknight said:

That's actually really interesting just in general. I've always thought of Mr. Zahn as basically just Thrawn for some reason, so it's kind of funny to hear him say he doesn't know something.

All the authors are very knowledgeable about what they've written. The problems start when you start asking about things they didn't put in the books, LMAO. But he certainly immediately got what I was talking about and had a coherent answer to it, even though he didn't have a ballpark length off the top of his head.

[m4st3rt3ch]

Stackpole? I'd go full Battletech/Shadowrun-nerd on him. I don't know how often i read both series over the years, but it was often. His Warrior and Kerensky-trilogies are magnificent. And not to forget his DragonCrown Wars. *drool*

On another note, i envy your talent. Others like Jerac may excel at larger scale, but you are the Lord of Mini-MOCs.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

4 hours ago, m4st3rt3ch said:

Stackpole? I'd go full Battletech/Shadowrun-nerd on him. I don't know how often i read both series over the years, but it was often. His Warrior and Kerensky-trilogies are magnificent. And not to forget his DragonCrown Wars. *drool*

Y'all should all come to Dragon Con. Stackpole is even more accessible than Zahn, since he does a ton of stuff with the Writing and Sci-Fi Lit tracks as well as Star Wars. We only had the one SW Authors panel, but (according to the schedule at least) Stackpole ran or spoke at at least 13 other panels and writing workshops for various tracks this weekend. You can meet these people too, as long as you can get to Atlanta over Labor Day weekend.

 

On that note, Dragon Con is now over, which means my workload is abruptly much lower and I can hopefully finally get more stuff done here. Right now I have, if I've counted correctly, ten new models and two major modifications to old models finished digitally that I have to physically test-build and then make instructions for, so my plan is to knock those out first and then move on to more new stuff, including hopefully larger stuff. In terms of large ships (over ~300 meters), I have partial models of an AA-9 Coruscant freighter, a Battle Dragon, a Hammerhead, a Dreadnaught, a Gladiator, a New Republic Correctional Transport, a Venator, and a Yuuzhan Vong yorik-stronha, plus modification to turn 75252 into an ISD2 and more accurate ISD1. The yorik-stronha and NRCT are the most complete of those and will probably be finished first, although as usual my schedule is determined primarily by my happening to wake up with a good idea for how to design some specific bit rather than by actively deciding to work on something, so things will happen when they happen.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

So here's something incredibly annoying. I had these models of the Curich-class shuttle and IV QR that I was pretty happy with, and I went to build them, and it turns out they don't work; you can't build the noses like that. They should work, but do not. The ends of those brackets are 1x1 studs, so you'd think you could connect them together like that, but for God knows what reason the end of that piece is exactly 1x1 studs, without the normal 0.1mm horizontal tolerance that lets two pieces actually sit next to each other, with the result being that two brackets don't like to sit face-to-face on a plate like that. In retrospect, I've actually run into this problem before (in the Cantwell, and maybe the Imperialis too), but this is the first model where it's become obvious that that was what was wrong with it. A bunch of the 1x1 brackets in my collection are slightly worn and will make this connection without protest, but new ones pop off. For these two models I can easily fix it by switching one of those to an inverted bracket and an inverted slope, which results in an identical model, but I'm going to have to do more work on the Cantwell. I was already planning to do that anyway, since I've been meaning to re-engineer how the upper hull panels there are attached to incorporate lessons learned from the Immobilizer, but I'd thought I'd wait and see what the new Cantwell in Andor looks like before screwing with it; but if that's an actually illegal connection and not just annoying to build that timetable may need to move up.

Edited September 6, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[natesroom]

Its great that you actually make these in real life. I said earlier i dont do any starwars legos, but because your idea is so compartmentalized (just ships in scale) i might actually start building these.

Question: your builds are exclusively using LBG no LG correct?

Edited September 6, 2022 by natesroom

[Kdapt-Preacher]

4 hours ago, natesroom said:

Its great that you actually make these in real life. I said earlier i dont do any starwars legos, but because your idea is so compartmentalized (just ships in scale) i might actually start building these.

Question: your builds are exclusively using LBG no LG correct?

Thanks! It's very important to me that they all be buildable. I don't really care whether anybody actually does build them (including myself; I test-build them, in whatever random colored parts I have laying around, but I don't have remotely enough parts to actually keep all of these assembled, or even to build many of them in the right colors the first time), but it does matter that somebody could. That's the big problem with Executor, really; I have complete confidence that I could make something that would look good, but it's too big to test-build, even in sections, and I don't know how to convince myself that I'm engineering it adequately otherwise.

Almost exclusively LBG, but there are a handful of pieces in LG because they don't exist in LBG. I strongly prefer to use pieces that're currently in production whenever possible, but occasionally there's a good enough reason not to if there's no other piece that'll accomplish the same thing. Let's see, off the top of my head I think the four 1x5 technic plates in the Cantwell's nose, the round 1x1s with fins that I used for the 'waist' of the two grey CR90s, and the 1x2 hinge plate in the mandibles of the YT-1000 are the only ones, but there might be another one or two somewhere. Not very many, though. I do approve of the idea of mixing LG and LBG to get a more weathered look on the freighters and whatnot, and I would encourage anyone who likes that style to go for it, but I haven't done it in these Stud.io files.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

#187-190, more small Imperial ships! I don't know whether you guys get tired of small Imperial ships, but I sure don't. This set includes the PB-950 patrol boat, the Curich-class shuttle, the Far*Reach IV PQR, and the builder shuttle from Force Commander. We're kinda scraping the bottom of the Expanded Universe barrel here, but as far as I'm concerned as long as there still is a barrel we haven't scraped enough yet. I also just published an update to the previous small Imperial ships pack to correct the aforementioned bracket problem, which impacted the IPV-1 in that set as well; the new version of the model is externally identical.

[icm]

The one on the bottom right looks an awful lot like an Eagle from Space 1999. Ironic considering the origin of the Millennium Falcon. Intentional?

[Kdapt-Preacher]

11 hours ago, icm said:

The one on the bottom right looks an awful lot like an Eagle from Space 1999. Ironic considering the origin of the Millennium Falcon. Intentional?

That's an interesting suggestion. I hadn't made the connection, but it definitely does look like somebody tried to build an Eagle out of Lambda parts. That's also just a pretty simple design for a ship that's supposed to pick up large containers, so it could be a coincidence, but it certainly could be intentional. I have no idea.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

#191 and 192, CR-20 and CR25 troop carriers! I started that CR-20 model ages ago but really wanted the top ingot piece in red. LEGO has now released that piece, so here it is! No, I don't know why 'CR-20' has a hyphen and 'CR25' doesn't, so don't ask me.

[natesroom]

Are you still working on the Dreadnaught?

also what about the NeutronStar rebel bulk cruiser?

Edited September 8, 2022 by natesroom

[Kdapt-Preacher]

9 hours ago, natesroom said:

Are you still working on the Dreadnaught?

also what about the NeutronStar rebel bulk cruiser?

Ugh, the Dreadnaught. Yes, I'm still working on it, but I haven't made a whole lot of progress in like a year. I haven't come up with a clean solution to all the awkward angles around the back, and every time I open that .io file I get an overwhelming urge to work on literally anything else, LMAO. I have a decent build for the head and engines but basically nothing in the middle yet. What I probably ought to do is drop the Canon version for now and work on the Legends design instead, which I think is an easier shape to achieve despite all its curves. Sigh. It'll happen, but it's not going to be the next large ship I finish.

The Neutron Star is on my radar, but it's just such an unbelievably ugly ship, LMAO. There's a serious lack of Rebel capital ships, so I'll probably get to it eventually, but I'd prioritize Mon Cala stuff over it. I should do an MC40 some time...

Edited September 9, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[natesroom]

UGH a moncal with all those curves! and its a big ship, about 85% the size of a ISD.

I like the Neutron Look! Dont forget the classic Nebulan B.

The legends version is the real Dreadnaught anyways... played a heavy role in the Thrawn Trilogy.

Love a hapan battle dragon

http://alexeysmirnov1977.com/Images/SWOFF/V.HAP1.jpg

Edited September 9, 2022 by natesroom