[MOC] KdaptPreacher's 1:1455 Fleet --- 207 ships and counting (New: MC30c Frigate)

[Geihlen]

Those are looking really good. I think the light gray was the right choice on the Phantom and the Thunderclap is looking slick.

I have a soft spot for the player ships in TOR, so I'm glad to see you do more of them.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

#163, the BT-7 Thunderclap! Although this is externally very similar to the version I posted a couple days ago, the bits under the center tiles have been rejiggered, and I extended the cockpit by a plate to better match the source material. As for the other TOR player ships, the Fury and Defender are published; the Phantom model is finished, but has to wait for the Stud.io update to publish; the XS Stock Freighter is in progress; and I still have only a very vague idea of how I'm going to tackle the D5-Mantis (that's the hard one, for sure).

[Kage Goomba]

6 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

#163, the BT-7 Thunderclap! Although this is externally very similar to the version I posted a couple days ago, the bits under the center tiles have been rejiggered, and I extended the cockpit by a plate to better match the source material. As for the other TOR player ships, the Fury and Defender are published; the Phantom model is finished, but has to wait for the Stud.io update to publish; the XS Stock Freighter is in progress; and I still have only a very vague idea of how I'm going to tackle the D5-Mantis (that's the hard one, for sure).

Love it.

[Geihlen]

Looking really good! I'm excited to see your takes on the rest of the TOR ships. The Mantis should be really interesting. I don't know that I've ever seen one done in Lego at any scale.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

15 minutes ago, Geihlen said:

Looking really good! I'm excited to see your takes on the rest of the TOR ships. The Mantis should be really interesting. I don't know that I've ever seen one done in Lego at any scale.

We are gonna have to see. I don't know what it's going to look like yet. My current plan is to have it be a shell around a technic frame built off one of these things, but there's not very much room inside the ship for that. I suspect the angles are going to be a bit sketchy however you slice it.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

On 1/19/2022 at 10:44 PM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

We are gonna have to see. I don't know what it's going to look like yet. My current plan is to have it be a shell around a technic frame built off one of these things, but there's not very much room inside the ship for that. I suspect the angles are going to be a bit sketchy however you slice it.

I was way off. There's nowhere near enough room to do it like that, not by a factor of about 4. I'd been under the impression that all the player ships were about the same size, but this one's apparently about 20% smaller than the others, so there isn't really room to do much of anything tricky. This is my very very rough first pass (images in the spoiler, since they're large)--I'm not committing to this at all, but this is what I'm looking at at the moment. It's tragic that that 2x6 wedge plate isn't available in dark green, which is what it really needs to be, but I may just have to live with the color being wrong, 'cuz I don't have a better plan for that shape at the moment. If you do, as always, suggestions are entirely welcome....

Spoiler

 

[Geihlen]

22 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I was way off. There's nowhere near enough room to do it like that, not by a factor of about 4. I'd been under the impression that all the player ships were about the same size, but this one's apparently about 20% smaller than the others, so there isn't really room to do much of anything tricky. This is my very very rough first pass (images in the spoiler, since they're large)--I'm not committing to this at all, but this is what I'm looking at at the moment. It's tragic that that 2x6 wedge plate isn't available in dark green, which is what it really needs to be, but I may just have to live with the color being wrong, 'cuz I don't have a better plan for that shape at the moment. If you do, as always, suggestions are entirely welcome....

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I think that's a genuinely good first stab at it. My immediate suggestions would be to swap the tan parts for orange ones (provided they exist in orange), as I think it might match the model a little better. I don't think the two different greens are inherently a bad thing, the Mantis has a fair amount of weathering in game iirc and this kind of replicates that. Also, the back end doesn't feature engines quite like this moc, but not having them might allow you to bring in some cheese wedge pieces and make the back end a smidge more on model.

Edit: Also, looking at the game model again, maybe cheese wedge pieces could replace the 61409 wedges. You could use one and either stack a second below it, or maybe use a tile or even....use part 49307 under them in orange.

Edit 2: Couldn't help but mess with it when I got home. I hope you don't mind. It gets a little thicc, but the Mantis isn't exactly streamlined, so maybe something like this:

 

or this with a hinge:

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2022 by Geihlen

[Kdapt-Preacher]

On 1/21/2022 at 12:13 PM, Geihlen said:

Edit: Also, looking at the game model again, maybe cheese wedge pieces could replace the 61409 wedges. You could use one and either stack a second below it, or maybe use a tile or even....use part 49307 under them in orange.

Edit 2: Couldn't help but mess with it when I got home. I hope you don't mind. It gets a little thicc, but the Mantis isn't exactly streamlined, so maybe something like this:

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or this with a hinge:

 

 

 

Oooh, yessss. This is exactly the kind of feedback I want to come back to. That's what it needs to look like. I'll credit you on the Rebrickable page when this gets published.

The back end of the model is going to have to be a bit ugly, I think, because a) the hinge connection to the top slope bit means it isn't an integer stud distance and b) the 6x2 wedge extends a little bit farther to the bottom rear than the actual hull plate does (a 5x2 wedge might work better, if one existed, but alas). I'm going to put a bracket or something there to smooth it out a bit, but that section won't quite match the ship. But given the scale, I think we're looking pretty solid overall.

EDIT: Also, if you or anybody else reading this ever wants to play around with any of this WIP stuff, I'm happy to post the Stud.io files directly so you don't have to try to recreate them. Obviously you get full access to them when I publish the model anyway, but if you've got an idea and don't want to wait to see how it looks, all you have to do is ask. :)

 

 

 

Spoiler

First pass on the XS Stock Light Freighter. This is a much simpler ship shape-wise than the Mantis, so it's a pretty straightforward build. This is one where the proportions don't work out very cleanly at this scale; the cockpit and cargo modules both really ought to be about 1.5 studs wide and tall, so they're a bit oversized here, but the ship is definitely still recognizable, so I'm not too worried about it. The diagonal stripe on the cargo section is supposed to mimic the stripe there on the actual ship, but it looks terrible like that, so that's almost certainly not going to be the final coloration I go with.

Edited January 23, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[Kdapt-Preacher]

On 1/21/2022 at 12:13 PM, Geihlen said:

Edit 2: Couldn't help but mess with it when I got home. I hope you don't mind. It gets a little thicc, but the Mantis isn't exactly streamlined, so maybe something like this:

So this is roughly what that ends up looking like, plus a cutaway view so you can see how it's put together. It's a chonker for sure, but not *that* much more than the original ship is, and the shape is definitely way better than the first pass version. The back end still needs a bit more work, and I may poke at the cockpit end and the bottom engine (/weapon?) pylon more too, so I'm not calling this 'finished' quite yet, but I think this is basically what it's going to look like. It's unfortunate that the colors can't match a little closer, since the combination of lighter green and brighter orange makes this look a bit more garish than the original, but there's not much to be done about that. I think we've done a good job of capturing the overall spirit of the thing, anyway, which is really the important part.

Spoiler

 

Edited January 23, 2022 by Kdapt-Preacher

[MAVERICK26]

Wow, that looks great!

[Geihlen]

36 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

So this is roughly what that ends up looking like, plus a cutaway view so you can see how it's put together. It's a chonker for sure, but not *that* much more than the original ship is, and the shape is definitely way better than the first pass version. The back end still needs a bit more work, and I may poke at the cockpit end and the bottom engine (/weapon?) pylon more too, so I'm not calling this 'finished' quite yet, but I think this is basically what it's going to look like. It's unfortunate that the colors can't match a little closer, since the combination of lighter green and brighter orange makes this look a bit more garish than the original, but there's not much to be done about that. I think we've done a good job of capturing the overall spirit of the thing, anyway, which is really the important part.

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I'm glad my suggestions helped! I think, especially given the scale, that this has come out really good. The cutaway really shows what needs to be done to get the shape as close as you did. It seems like such a brick in game, but it has some very weird shapes.

And I think your XS is looking great too. I wonder if we could at least get the cargo pod on the side a little shorter. I guess it would require a redesign of that entire area. But if we tried something with studs facing up, you might be able to get that painted stripe with some wedges. My mental image of that solution isn't as clear as the Mantis suggestions I had though. I might have to fiddle on stud.io later.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

43 minutes ago, Geihlen said:

And I think your XS is looking great too. I wonder if we could at least get the cargo pod on the side a little shorter. I guess it would require a redesign of that entire area. But if we tried something with studs facing up, you might be able to get that painted stripe with some wedges. My mental image of that solution isn't as clear as the Mantis suggestions I had though. I might have to fiddle on stud.io later.

The cargo pod is really easy to change around, since that's just stuck onto a bracket right now. Flipping the studs up is trivial. Do you mean it should be shorter vertically or lengthwise? (Really it should be both, but by less than one stud in both dimensions, and I was thinking this looked more in proportion to the cockpit and engines). So we can easily jump to something like the image here, or put the brackets in the middle of the cargo pod itself to flip the orientation midway through (kinda like I have with the Wayfarer-class, for example), but I'm not sure that buys us much in terms of the stripe. Basically no useful wedges are available in dark orange, unfortunately, so the color options are limited. Which is true for almost every ship at this scale that isn't just Imperial grey anyway, though, to be honest--almost all the ships I've made have had to have color schemes that convey the impression of the original as best as possible rather than ones that're literally accurate to specific patterns.

Spoiler

 

[Geihlen]

2 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

The cargo pod is really easy to change around, since that's just stuck onto a bracket right now. Flipping the studs up is trivial. Do you mean it should be shorter vertically or lengthwise? (Really it should be both, but by less than one stud in both dimensions, and I was thinking this looked more in proportion to the cockpit and engines). So we can easily jump to something like the image here, or put the brackets in the middle of the cargo pod itself to flip the orientation midway through (kinda like I have with the Wayfarer-class, for example), but I'm not sure that buys us much in terms of the stripe. Basically no useful wedges are available in dark orange, unfortunately, so the color options are limited. Which is true for almost every ship at this scale that isn't just Imperial grey anyway, though, to be honest--almost all the ships I've made have had to have color schemes that convey the impression of the original as best as possible rather than ones that're literally accurate to specific patterns.

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My original thought was shorter vertically. I believe 4 stacked plates are just slightly shorter than the 2 stud wide tile on its side that you had there in the first picture. But I got to fiddling and I think I got it slightly shorter both vertically and horizontally...or maybe I lost track of dimensions and only got it a little shorter vertically. I may have also gotten too weird with the shape to try and mimic that orange on the front of the cargo pod, but you can still get a feel for what I mean, I hope. The bracket on the side is for the little gun, I just could not for the life of me remember that part number or what it's classed under.

 

I also was messing with trying to get that raised piece of the hull that runs into the cargo pod. Again, might be too weird, but once I had a mock-up going I just kept tinkering.

 

 

Edited January 23, 2022 by Geihlen

[Kdapt-Preacher]

18 minutes ago, Geihlen said:

My original thought was shorter vertically. I believe 4 stacked plates are just slightly shorter than the 2 stud wide tile on its side that you had there in the first picture. But I got to fiddling and I think I got it slightly shorter both vertically and horizontally...or maybe I lost track of dimensions and only got it a little shorter vertically. I may have also gotten too weird with the shape to try and mimic that orange on the front of the cargo pod, but you can still get a feel for what I mean, I hope. The bracket on the side is for the little gun, I just could not for the life of me remember that part number or what it's classed under.

Mmm. Yeah, I see what you mean. I guess my question with that is whether the cargo pod is really that much smaller than the cockpit section. In the images I've been looking at they seem to be very close to the same size, and to my eyes shrinking the cargo section by that much relative to the cockpit throws off the proportions of the ship somewhat. Now, really the problem there is that *both* the cockpit and cargo module are too large, and on an ideal model they'd both be about 1.5 studs wide, but I haven't come up with any realistic way to narrow the cockpit (making it 1 stud wide instead of 2 looks ridiculous, especially since the nose has to end up close to square, so that means the whole ship also has to get about half as tall), so I'm kinda stuck with that. It's a purely artistic choice whether you'd prefer to have the cargo section be closer to the right size but different from the cockpit or for them both to be off by the same amount--my general view in cases like this (there have been quite a few of them) is that having the features both be wrong but correct relative to each other usually conveys the 'feel' of the ship better than preserving the more literal scale accuracy, but obviously anybody else's opinions may vary there. I'm open to being convinced, especially since I'm not personally super familiar with the ship.

I'll continue screwing with this and see if I can make it look any better. Among other things I'd prefer to have the whole thing built off a 5-stud-diameter circle instead of 6, but I think that's probably not going to turn out to be worth the amount of mess it would require compared to using the convenient 6x6 round plates. Also, ideally the entire ship would also get about two plates shorter, which would also help with shortening the cargo section, but that's constrained by the heights of the engines and the starboard docking ring. Those should also be about 1.5-stud diameter, but there aren't any flat round pieces of that size, so scaling them up to two studs means thickening the whole thing just a bit. I dunno. Like I said in the previous post, this is one where the dimensions just don't work out conveniently. There are some ships where most of the major features happen to work out to an integer number of studs, and some where they don't, and the ones where they don't are a pain in the neck.

[Geihlen]

10 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Mmm. Yeah, I see what you mean. I guess my question with that is whether the cargo pod is really that much smaller than the cockpit section. In the images I've been looking at they seem to be very close to the same size, and to my eyes shrinking the cargo section by that much relative to the cockpit throws off the proportions of the ship somewhat. Now, really the problem there is that *both* the cockpit and cargo module are too large, and on an ideal model they'd both be about 1.5 studs wide, but I haven't come up with any realistic way to narrow the cockpit (making it 1 stud wide instead of 2 looks ridiculous, especially since the nose has to end up close to square, so that means the whole ship also has to get about half as tall), so I'm kinda stuck with that. It's a purely artistic choice whether you'd prefer to have the cargo section be closer to the right size but different from the cockpit or for them both to be off by the same amount--my general view in cases like this (there have been quite a few of them) is that having the features both be wrong but correct relative to each other usually conveys the 'feel' of the ship better than preserving the more literal scale accuracy, but obviously anybody else's opinions may vary there. I'm open to being convinced, especially since I'm not personally super familiar with the ship.

I'll continue screwing with this and see if I can make it look any better. Among other things I'd prefer to have the whole thing built off a 5-stud-diameter circle instead of 6, but I think that's probably not going to turn out to be worth the amount of mess it would require compared to using the convenient 6x6 round plates. Also, ideally the entire ship would also get about two plates shorter, which would also help with shortening the cargo section, but that's constrained by the heights of the engines and the starboard docking ring. Those should also be about 1.5-stud diameter, but there aren't any flat round pieces of that size, so scaling them up to two studs means thickening the whole thing just a bit. I dunno. Like I said in the previous post, this is one where the dimensions just don't work out conveniently. There are some ships where most of the major features happen to work out to an integer number of studs, and some where they don't, and the ones where they don't are a pain in the neck.

 

This ship is deceptively difficult I'm discovering. In some art the pod looks more narrow, in others it looks more or less the same width and that's to say nothing of some of the other oddities.

That said, I think you're right that they are the same, or damn near enough to not matter especially at this scale. As a result, you widening the cargo pod is the best look either of us has gotten so far imo. If only the triangle tile (35787) came in dark orange, then you could get a stripe in there too.

I'll probably still fiddle too. I can't seem to leave well enough alone with puzzles like these.

Edited January 23, 2022 by Geihlen

[Geihlen]

Well, I wasn't able to come up with any new solutions for the XS, buuuuuuuuut I did have a thought about the Mantis. Obviously, colors tweaked to taste (and a couple renders are with unavailable colors), but I think it might have some potential:

 

[Kdapt-Preacher]

3 hours ago, Geihlen said:

Well, I wasn't able to come up with any new solutions for the XS, buuuuuuuuut I did have a thought about the Mantis. Obviously, colors tweaked to taste (and a couple renders are with unavailable colors), but I think it might have some potential:

 

 

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Yeah, I’ve been looking at options for the weapon pods too. Those angled minifig stand pieces were great when the orange circles were flat against the side of the ship, but if the mounts are angled already it makes more sense for the pods to extend straight out, like you have them. I would prefer that the pods be less bulky than that, but I’m not sure it’s going to happen (and this matches the thiccness of the rest of the ship, anyway, so it may be for the best). Do you know, is there a gun mounted on the bottom pylon as well, or is that just an engine? None of the schematics I’ve found make that clear. 

[Geihlen]

10 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Yeah, I’ve been looking at options for the weapon pods too. Those angled minifig stand pieces were great when the orange circles were flat against the side of the ship, but if the mounts are angled already it makes more sense for the pods to extend straight out, like you have them. I would prefer that the pods be less bulky than that, but I’m not sure it’s going to happen (and this matches the thiccness of the rest of the ship, anyway, so it may be for the best). Do you know, is there a gun mounted on the bottom pylon as well, or is that just an engine? None of the schematics I’ve found make that clear. 

It looks like the guns are mounted under the engine pod in game, and that's what I remember from my time with it as well. I was trying to come up with a way to get a gun center mounted on the ones I was messing with, but couldn't really come up with an elegant solution, at least not with the rounded 1x2s I was experimenting with.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

5 hours ago, Geihlen said:

It looks like the guns are mounted under the engine pod in game, and that's what I remember from my time with it as well. I was trying to come up with a way to get a gun center mounted on the ones I was messing with, but couldn't really come up with an elegant solution, at least not with the rounded 1x2s I was experimenting with.

Yeah, mounting anything on the center of those is awkward. Those pieces are the basis for most of my small shuttles, so I've spent a lot of time looking at that.

Current working version. I'm reasonably satisfied with this, I think. I realized after I rendered those that I forgot to change the 1x2 plates under the orange bit away from dark green, but you can only see the ends of those from the back anyway, so that's not a big deal either way. One of the renders in that album is an alternate version of the back, which has pluses and minuses; it looks a little bit more 'finished', but it's not any more accurate to the original ship, and the model's already a bit too long as it is, so I think the simpler version might make more sense. The last render there is the model in dark green and dark orange, which is what it probably ought to look like except that none of those pieces exist in those colors.

[Geihlen]

19 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Yeah, mounting anything on the center of those is awkward. Those pieces are the basis for most of my small shuttles, so I've spent a lot of time looking at that.

Current working version. I'm reasonably satisfied with this, I think. I realized after I rendered those that I forgot to change the 1x2 plates under the orange bit away from dark green, but you can only see the ends of those from the back anyway, so that's not a big deal either way. One of the renders in that album is an alternate version of the back, which has pluses and minuses; it looks a little bit more 'finished', but it's not any more accurate to the original ship, and the model's already a bit too long as it is, so I think the simpler version might make more sense. The last render there is the model in dark green and dark orange, which is what it probably ought to look like except that none of those pieces exist in those colors.

I'm pretty fond of this version! I tend to think that the original back is probably the way to go. As you said, neither are super accurate , but you'd have to add to the ship's length for not a whole lot of gain imo.

Seeing it in the "proper" colors really makes me hope we get them one day. I think they really sell the work you've done.

I think this design has gotten some really nice refinements and really sells what you see in game. If it were my design, I'd probably call it done, or be pretty close to doing so.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

I'm satisfied with this as the final version as well. #164, the D5-Mantis patrol craft! The model has to be manually approved by a Rebrickable admin because the 2x6 wedges haven't been entered into their database in green yet, so that link probably won't work until a couple of hours after I post this, but everybody in this thread has seen what the ship looks like at this point anyway.

[Geihlen]

I really like the way this turned out. Your builds from The Old Republic are some of my favorites of your whole fleet and I think I'm going to have to build them all, but especially the Defender and this one.

Edited January 24, 2022 by Geihlen

[Kdapt-Preacher]

I did some walking around and measuring today, and it turns out my garage is indeed large enough for a model of Executor at this scale. It'd be about 43 feet long if I went with the canon 19 km length, or just under 40 feet for the ~17.6 that the movie actually depicts (which would probably be my preference). My back-of-the-napkin calculations suggest that 5000 16x16 plates would be plenty for the outer hull panels, which isn't even completely outrageous...

[Geihlen]

So when do you start designing it? :P

[Kdapt-Preacher]

3 minutes ago, Geihlen said:

So when do you start designing it? :P

Stud.io is having a bit of a rough time with it. There seems to be a limit on view distance. I've just blocked out the dimensions (only 1600 studs long, nothing crazy...) and it's not wanting to render the whole thing at once. I haven't tried to seriously estimate how many pieces the whole model would be (order of magnitude, maybe a million?), but it has trouble just loading the UCS ISD, so this may need to wait until I get a better computer. Plus, the garage is big enough but there's currently a sixteen-foot sandcrawler in it, and I don't have anywhere else to put that at the moment. Have to see. I'm thinking about it...

 

On an unrelated note, I'm looking at Imperial hangars and smaller vehicles. The end of a tile turns out to be virtually exactly the right dimensions to be a Chariot LAV. I don't know that this really reads as anything at first glance, but that's what they'd look like. Eventually I'll build something with a hangar big enough to justify this kind of setup.