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

[Kdapt-Preacher]

One year ago today I published my first ever MOC: the Lambda-class Imperial shuttle. Before I posted it I already had a couple other ships built and ready to publish, including the Quasar Fire, so I did know at that point that I was going to go further than that single 18-piece model, but I would not have guessed that a year later I'd have 169 ships totaling almost 14,000 parts. I'm pretty pleased with this collection! My resolution for the next year, I think, is to build some bigger stuff--I've pretty much knocked off most of the obvious small ships, and while I do dearly love many of the more obscure EU things, it's probably time to get into some bigger models. I have in-progress models of the Immobilizer 418, the Vindicator-class, the Rebels version of the Dreadnaught, the Endar Spire, an Imperial II-class, Acushnet, a Battle Dragon, and the New Republic Correctional Transport from The Mando. Of those, the Immobilizer, Vindicator, Acushnet, and NRCT are reasonably close to being finished; the others are still in the 'serious structural problems' phase. As usual, a) I make no promises regarding actual time before any of those get published and b) I tend to work on stuff in pretty random order, so it's very likely that multiple other ships that aren't currently in progress will get started and finished in less time than it takes me to finish all of those; but there's your brief snapshot of what the pipeline currently looks like. I also have the Windfall and an HT-2200 finished, so when I get a couple more light freighters those will go out as well.

As I predicted three weeks ago, I did not finish the Immobilizer or anything really exciting to celebrate the anniversary (I've started a new job recently and have been busy, so I didn't expect to). But, I do not come entirely empty-handed:

#166-169, more small Imperial ships! With the Y-4 'Raptor' transport, the Gamma-class assault shuttle, the Skipray blastboat, and the Imperial Assault Shuttle. The Skipray is definitely scraping what I would consider an acceptable resolution--it is, unfortunately, a very small ship, and I'm honestly not sure this is really recognizable--but it's such a prominent vehicle in the old EU that I really wanted a model of it, so here we are. The others should be more recognizable, at least insofar as the ships themselves are recognizable, which is going to be 'not very' to anybody who isn't familiar with 25-year-old video games. But that is, of course, why we're all here.

 

 

 

18 hours ago, Stormsword said:

As an aside, would you be interested in joining the Fractalsponge discord? We have a pretty active community of 3D modellers, and your content here would fit in quite well with that. Also, we have a really nice set of ortho shots for a wide variety of ships if you'd want. Cheers man, and keep up the good work.

Thank you! And oooh, yes, I am interested. I'm always looking for orthographic shots of ships. I've pulled a bunch of Fractalsponge's website, but I'd love to see others. Where can I find the Discord server?

 

 

 

 

EDIT:

Edited February 23, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[Kage Goomba]

26 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

One year ago today I published my first ever MOC: the Lambda-class Imperial shuttle. Before I posted it I already had a couple other ships built and ready to publish, including the Quasar Fire, so I did know at that point that I was going to go further than that single 18-piece model, but I would not have guessed that a year later I'd have 169 ships totaling almost 14,000 parts. I'm pretty pleased with this collection! My resolution for the next year, I think, is to build some bigger stuff--I've pretty much knocked off most of the obvious small ships, and while I do dearly love many of the more obscure EU things, it's probably time to get into some bigger models. I have in-progress models of the Immobilizer 418, the Vindicator-class, the Rebels version of the Dreadnaught, the Endar Spire, an Imperial II-class, Acushnet, a Battle Dragon, and the New Republic Correctional Transport from The Mando. Of those, the Immobilizer, Vindicator, Acushnet, and NRCT are reasonably close to being finished; the others are still in the 'serious structural problems' phase. As usual, a) I make no promises regarding actual time before any of those get published and b) I tend to work on stuff in pretty random order, so it's very likely that multiple other ships that aren't currently in progress will get started and finished in less time than it takes me to finish all of those; but there's your brief snapshot of what the pipeline currently looks like. I also have the Windfall and an HT-2200 finished, so when I get a couple more light freighters those will go out as well.

As I predicted three weeks ago, I did not finish the Immobilizer or anything really exciting to celebrate the anniversary (I've started a new job recently and have been busy, so I didn't expect to). But, I do not come entirely empty-handed:

#166-169, more small Imperial ships! With the Y-4 'Raptor' transport, the Gamma-class assault shuttle, the Skipray blastboat, and the Imperial Assault Shuttle. The Skipray is definitely scraping what I would consider an acceptable resolution--it is, unfortunately, a very small ship, and I'm honestly not sure this is really recognizable--but it's such a prominent vehicle in the old EU that I really wanted a model of it, so here we are. The others should be more recognizable, at least insofar as the ships themselves are recognizable, which is going to be 'not very' to anybody who isn't familiar with 25-year-old video games. But that is, of course, why we're all here.

 

 

 

Thank you! And oooh, yes, I am interested. I'm always looking for orthographic shots of ships. I've pulled a bunch of Fractalsponge's website, but I'd love to see others. Where can I find the Discord server?

 

 

 

 

EDIT:

leme know if that discord is worthwhile....would be nice to talk to you on discord as well :P <pokes>

[Kdapt-Preacher]

5 minutes ago, Kage Goomba said:

leme know if that discord is worthwhile....would be nice to talk to you on discord as well :P <pokes>

Discord is not one of my primary social media platforms, so it's typically not an ideal place to try to talk to me (I'm on this forum basically every day, but I might not see a Discord message for months). But I'll see what it's like. I'll go pretty far out of my way for good orthographic pictures of starships...

[Kage Goomba]

1 minute ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Discord is not one of my primary social media platforms, so it's typically not an ideal place to try to talk to me (I'm on this forum basically every day, but I might not see a Discord message for months). But I'll see what it's like. I'll go pretty far out of my way for good orthographic pictures of starships...

Id like to find a MOC Community on discord myself.....with folks I talk too here....but most seem to be a bit anti-discord lol.

[Stormsword]

https://discord.gg/8u9FQF7

Here, this link should still work decently. Be glad to have you onboard man.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

Status update on the Immobilizer 418. I'm pretty satisfied with the overall fit of the hull, which is generally the hard part, so things are going well. At present this model is somewhat fragile; the ship isn't proportioned like an ISD, it's much thinner vertically, so there's very little space inside the hull for supports near the bow of the ship, and I'm a little worried about the lower panels sagging in the front. I think it's probably OK as it is, but I may come up with a way to strengthen it further. I'll have to build it and let it sit for a few days to see how it does.

The interface between the rear generator domes and the raised section of the hull is a bit awkward, and I'd appreciate people's thoughts on it. In an ideal world, the dome would be nicely embedded in that raised bit, but there's no plate with a circular cutout large enough to make that happen (EDIT: to clarify, there is such a piece, it just doesn't exist in any shade of grey, so it doesn't buy me much for the moment). So, I have basically two options:
A) Raise the dome up one plate and have an irregular cutout in the raised bit to accommodate it. This has probably the best proportions but the rough join between the raised bit and the dome is ugly;
or B) Raise the dome up another plate so it's sitting on top of the raised bit. This produces a nice clean join between the dome and the raised bit, but the 'dome' becomes more of a cylinder and looks out of proportion to the one in front.
Thoughts? Which one of these is the lesser of two evils? Or do you have a better solution?

Edited March 1, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[icm]

I like option B better 

[Stuartn]

I like B as well, while it is higher I think it looks better than the gap, but A is a clever solution as well

[Kage Goomba]

"A" looks better..better consistency. Structure wise the "sphere" is contained anyway as a grav well generator imho.

[Geihlen]

I think I tend to lean towards liking option b more. What does option B look like with the front domes raised a single plate (like the rear domes in option A)? Does that get things too out of whack with the overall scale of the ship? 

[Kdapt-Preacher]

Between here and Discord, we have an almost perfectly even split of opinions between A and B. Soren, over on the FractalSponge Discord, pointed out an in retrospect obvious smoother version of A (the 'now' version in the image), so I think the thing to do is to go with that for the moment and leave a note on the page that I'll update the model if the actual right piece, the 4x4 plate w/ round cutout, ever gets released in light grey (the 'later' version). That piece is pretty new (introduced in 2018) and has already appeared in 71 sets, so the odds of it showing up in LBG in the reasonably near future are probably good. The 'later' version is what this is really supposed to look like; if that was an option right now there'd be no question that that's what it would be.

 

It's also worth pointing out here (and I'll have to go into greater detail on the eventual MOC page) that the Immobilizer 418 is one of that lovely class of ship that's never been depicted in the same way twice in all the decades it's been around, so really there's a fair bit of wiggle room here. Like with my Lancer, this is going to be a composite of multiple sources to hit what I think conveys things best rather than a strict replication of a specific take on it. Obviously this is the usual four-well version rather than the weird two- or three-well ones from some very old media, but specifically this is going to be based primarily on the Empire at War version and the Essential Guide schematics, since those are the best known and most detailed. This whole section of the ship is different in some other media; in the old X-Wing games, for example, the raised part extends all the way forwards past both pairs of generators. My model is going to have 5 engines, as depicted in EaW (as opposed to 2, 3, or 8, as shown in other media), but it notably won't have the smaller secondary hangar. That hangar exists in some depictions because this was based on concept art for the Imperial-class, which is large enough to justify it, but when you scale the ship down to only 600 meters the smaller hangar becomes too small to really make sense. It's barely large enough to admit a single TIE fighter, much less a shuttle or anything useful, and at a whopping 1x1 studs there's no way it would ever be recognizable as an intentional opening on the midline of the model anyway; it would just look like I did a bad job of making the hull panels fit together. So that bit will be following the X-Wing series depiction, which lacks that.

[Mr Ogel]

10 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Between here and Discord, we have an almost perfectly even split of opinions between A and B. Soren, over on the FractalSponge Discord, pointed out an in retrospect obvious smoother version of A (the 'now' version in the image), so I think the thing to do is to go with that for the moment and leave a note on the page that I'll update the model if the actual right piece, the 4x4 plate w/ round cutout, ever gets released in light grey (the 'later' version). That piece is pretty new (introduced in 2018) and has already appeared in 71 sets, so the odds of it showing up in LBG in the reasonably near future are probably good.

and here it is: 

https://brickset.com/sets/containing-part-6353802

[Kdapt-Preacher]

3 hours ago, Mr Ogel said:

and here it is: 

https://brickset.com/sets/containing-part-6353802

HAH! Beautiful. Thanks for pointing that out! This is the second time in this project that a Mandalorian set has come out with the exact piece I needed just as I realized I needed it; let's hope that trend keeps up!

[Kdapt-Preacher]

The Immobilizer 418 is finished! I still need to make the instructions, but it'll be published either today or tomorrow depending on how long the final renders end up taking.

[Kage Goomba]

6 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

The Immobilizer 418 is finished! I still need to make the instructions, but it'll be published either today or tomorrow depending on how long the final renders end up taking.

Nice!

Good to know your still out and about - may need to poke you soon for my project hehe.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

#170, the Immobilizer 418 cruiser! Maybe the most famous EU Imperial ship and one of my personal favorites. I'm quite pleased with how this turned out. It ended up at 718 parts, just a hair smaller than the Quasar Fire. I'm building this as a Vindicator-class cruiser as well; that model will be published soon.

Full description from Rebrickable:

The Immobilizer 418 cruiser was among the most famous and feared ships of the Imperial Navy. Commonly referred to simply as Interdictors, these cruisers were equipped with powerful gravity well generators capable of pulling ships out of hyperspace. They were used to great effect against the New Republic by Grand Admiral Thrawn and many other Imperial commanders. At 1:1455 scale, or approximately 11.64 meters per stud, this model will perfectly complement your Star Wars fleet! This is UCS scale, designed to match 75252 Imperial Star Destroyer and my other ship models (and any of the huge number of other peoples' MOCs that are also designed to fit with the official Ultimate Collector Series ISDs).

First, to clarify, because the naming is a disaster: this is the Immobilizer 418 cruiser, which was the most common interdictor in Legends and used to be the ship that was usually meant when somebody said 'interdictor cruiser'. This is not the Interdictor-class Star Destroyer from Rebels, which is probably the most commonly referenced interdictor today and which looks very similar (because it's based on the same concept art) but is actually almost twice as large as this. It is also not the Interdictor-class Star Destroyer from Legends, which looks completely different; nor is it the Old Sith Interdictor-class cruiser. Why, why are they all named the same? I don't know.

The Interdictor cruiser is probably the best-established of all the old Legends Imperial Navy ships, and since its first appearance in Heir to the Empire more than thirty years ago it's been featured in dozens of stories across various media. It has also, unfortunately, rarely been depicted in exactly the same way twice. It's been shown with two, three, or four sets of gravity well generator domes; varying proportions; various configurations of hangars and brim notches; and two, three, four, five, or seven engines (special shout-out here to X-Wing vs TIE Fighter, which showed three engines in cutscenes but only two in normal gameplay--very helpful, guys!). This model is based mostly on the Empire at War version, because that's a) the most recent and highest-resolution and b) the one that people are most likely to be familiar with, but it's a composite of multiple sources rather than an attempt to perfectly match one. Notably I went with the four-engine layout rather than the five, solely because I think it looks better, but it would be very easy to swap to any of the other engine configurations if you prefer them.

I designed this model with the goal of making it easier to build than my Cantwell-class is, and I think I've succeeded, but this model is less sturdy overall because the hull plates are so thin. That extremely narrow profile is a key part of the ship's look, so I thought it was important to get that right, but the tradeoff is that there isn't a lot of room for reinforcements in the front part of the ship. Once you get it assembled it's plenty strong enough for a display model, but attaching the hull panels is a little awkward. I have built this version IRL and can confirm that this is all you actually need, but if you want to strengthen it a bit more you could easily add a few more tiles or ingots on the outside.

Final note: Part 35044 in light bluish grey is in the Mandalorian helmet set that just came out. They aren't available on BrickLink in large numbers yet as of the time of this writing, but they will be in a couple of weeks or so.

Edited March 21, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[Stuartn]

Amazing work, I really like the shaping and it appears very accurate to the source material, and great greebling along the sides of the hull. I couldn’t imagine it needing many more tiles to make it into the rebels version albeit scaled down.

Edited March 21, 2022 by Stuartn

[Kdapt-Preacher]

12 minutes ago, Stuartn said:

Amazing work, I really like the shaping and it appears very accurate to the source material, and great greebling along the sides of the hull. I couldn’t imagine it needing many more tiles to make it into the rebels version albeit scaled down.

Thanks! You could use this as a base for the Rebels version, but there are some significant structural differences there. They look similar from the top, but the Rebels one has this additional hull segment on the bottom that makes for a much more complex shape, and that extends into the back being completely different as well. To do it properly I think you'd need to build it along quite different lines, since the internal frame would have to change a lot to accommodate that. I do intend to make the Rebels version as well, but that'll be a ways down the line yet.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

WIP on the Vindicator. This is based on its lone canonical appearance in Battlefront: Elite Squadron, not any of the numerous fan designs. The flat platform thing with the comms array towards the front of the ship is a weird feature for an Imperial design, but I kinda like it.

I have some decisions to make here, because Elite Squadron is unfortunately a really terrible source. It's a PSP game, so the graphics were always going to be terrible, but even beyond that almost all the ships in the game are depicted extraordinarily badly. Their Nebulon-B frigates, for example, are proportioned so weirdly as to be almost unrecognizable. As a result there's going to be some guesswork here to figure out what the Vindicator "actually" looks like. The biggest question is where its guns are and how many there should be--the game doesn't show any turrets, presumably because they couldn't easily render moving parts like that, but unlike the Immobilizer this is a proper warship and is definitely supposed to have guns, so I need to figure out what those're going to look like. The brim guns in the trench notches are obvious, but I'm split on whether it's more reasonable to give it multiple small turrets (like an ISD's broadsides shrunken by a factor of two) or something like a single full-size ISD turret on each side. Thoughts?

[Kage Goomba]

6 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

WIP on the Vindicator. This is based on its lone canonical appearance in Battlefront: Elite Squadron, not any of the numerous fan designs. The flat platform thing with the comms array towards the front of the ship is a weird feature for an Imperial design, but I kinda like it.

I have some decisions to make here, because Elite Squadron is unfortunately a really terrible source. It's a PSP game, so the graphics were always going to be terrible, but even beyond that almost all the ships in the game are depicted extraordinarily badly. Their Nebulon-B frigates, for example, are proportioned so weirdly as to be almost unrecognizable. As a result there's going to be some guesswork here to figure out what the Vindicator "actually" looks like. The biggest question is where its guns are and how many there should be--the game doesn't show any turrets, presumably because they couldn't easily render moving parts like that, but unlike the Immobilizer this is a proper warship and is definitely supposed to have guns, so I need to figure out what those're going to look like. The brim guns in the trench notches are obvious, but I'm split on whether it's more reasonable to give it multiple small turrets (like an ISD's broadsides shrunken by a factor of two) or something like a single full-size ISD turret on each side. Thoughts?

I'd prob go with smaller guns - bigger guns on a small ship could be problematic in this case.

[ForgedInLego]

On 3/22/2022 at 11:03 PM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I have some decisions to make here, because Elite Squadron is unfortunately a really terrible source. It's a PSP game, so the graphics were always going to be terrible, but even beyond that almost all the ships in the game are depicted extraordinarily badly. Their Nebulon-B frigates, for example, are proportioned so weirdly as to be almost unrecognizable. As a result there's going to be some guesswork here to figure out what the Vindicator "actually" looks like. The biggest question is where its guns are and how many there should be--the game doesn't show any turrets, presumably because they couldn't easily render moving parts like that, but unlike the Immobilizer this is a proper warship and is definitely supposed to have guns, so I need to figure out what those're going to look like. The brim guns in the trench notches are obvious, but I'm split on whether it's more reasonable to give it multiple small turrets (like an ISD's broadsides shrunken by a factor of two) or something like a single full-size ISD turret on each side. Thoughts?

I'd give it smaller turrets in the classic Kuat bridge flanking setup. Maybe 2 on each side?

[Kdapt-Preacher]

18 hours ago, ForgedInLego said:

I'd give it smaller turrets in the classic Kuat bridge flanking setup. Maybe 2 on each side?

This is actually a Sienar ship, not KDY. But yeah, I'm thinking I'm going to use the same binocular turrets I have on the Arquitens. Consistency and all that. It does look good with ISD turrets, though, so I may include a file for that as well. I think the model is finished but I haven't made the instructions yet; it'll be out soonish.

Completely unrelated to that, I was thinking about GAR ground vehicles. They're almost all just too small to really differentiate at this scale, but when they're grouped together I think you can tell what's supposed to be what. I haven't decided whether I think this is actually worth posting as a MOC, but the SPHA-T is reasonable, at least. The scale for that is questionable: the official word is 140 meters long, but that's immediately obviously incompatible with what's shown in the movie--the actual length is somewhere less than half that. There's a picture in the Complete Locations book that puts it around 50-60 meters, which is more plausible, so that's what this is scaled to. It may still be slightly larger than they actually were in AoTC, but without a source for the actual measurements I think it's acceptably close.

[Per_SW]

That minimalist LAAT Gunship is perfect, and I suppose the quarter-circles on studs are supposed to be the deployed command posts where we see Yoda operate?

[icm]

The teeny tiny Gunship is recognizable, too bad there’s no connection between the front half and the back half.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

13 minutes ago, Per_SW said:

That minimalist LAAT Gunship is perfect, and I suppose the quarter-circles on studs are supposed to be the deployed command posts where we see Yoda operate?

Thanks! I was thinking about AT-APs when I made the quarter-circle things, but honestly at this scale they can be pretty much whatever you want them to represent. About the best you can hope for is that they're reminiscent of Republic military stuff.

9 minutes ago, icm said:

The teeny tiny Gunship is recognizable, too bad there’s no connection between the front half and the back half.

Yeah, I know. It wouldn't lose much to replace the green bit with a 1x2 white plate connecting the halves at the bottom, but my tendency would be to display it on a 1x2 black plate w/ rounded ends, like my Lady Luck or Y-wings. I don't like doing that because it's inelegant, but these things happen. This is partly why I haven't actually published this as a MOC yet (and may not do so in this format at all). My only real intended use case for these things is as decoration in the hangar of a Venator, where it wouldn't matter that they don't stick together in flight. I'd like to come up with a better way to do it, though--it feels like there ought to be a piece out there that would make for a better representation of the shape of the wings, but I haven't hit on one yet.