MIDI-Scale Invisible Hand and Venator

[Hold0511]

Sweet - looking forward to add this baby to sit next to his big bro...

[Kristof]

Done. Proof build went nice. Except for few technical gotchas that make making the instructions more complicated but really simplifies the building experience (I think anyway), it should be relatively easy to finish from here.

[Iperial_Fleet_Commander]

9 hours ago, krisandkris12 said:

Done. Proof build went nice. Except for few technical gotchas that make making the instructions more complicated but really simplifies the building experience (I think anyway), it should be relatively easy to finish from here.

<snip>

As Krennic once said...

Oh, it's beautiful...

Memes aside, looks fantastic! Do you have an estimation of when the instructions will be done? Super excited to build this.

Edited September 21, 2018 by BEAVeR
Please don't quote images

[Kristof]

^ Few days

[Neodaemmerung]

I have been watching this off and on for years!  I am so excited to see it come to completion and cannot wait to build it myself!  It looks just wonderful and especially given how let-down I felt with the Lego Venator, yours is simply stunning.  I would love to see you tackle the separatist cruisers too!

[Kristof]

^Hey, thank you! I am glad you are interested in the other cruisers as well. Most people seem to adore Venator and Ignore everything around. I will for sure update the Invisible Hand and create instructions for that one as well, and who knows, there are still other separatist vessels to model :D My ultimate dream would be the Trade Federation core ship in scale with Venator, though that would yield probably the largest model of that ship ever built in Lego... I don't think I have a capacity cor that :D

Meanwhile waiting for some renders to get done and working on polishing the instructions with unnecessary (but in some way unexpendable!) details :D

Edited September 24, 2018 by krisandkris12

[Neodaemmerung]

Your renders are looking great, keep it up! 
I never understood why lego didn't ever produce a large Munificent-class star frigate (as apparently the Separatist frigates are called, thanks wookieepedia) in the same vein as the Venator as a play-set style model.  Oh well, if it was only as good as that Venator, I would have been disappointed anyway.  I would be much more interested in your version of the Munificent in comparable scale to your Venator.

Meanwhile maybe it's time I start tinkering in that lego design software... I have spent countless hours in Empyrion building ships, maybe I can transfer that knowledge back over to Legos and produce a good model of the Imperial Light Cruiser :)
 

[Kristof]

^ I would certainly give it a go.

Btw I have finalized the part lists that will go with the instructions. I separated them into two, one for the ship alone and the other one for the stand. Though I highly recommend building the stand, I know some people plan onto building their own fixtures, and also except for the connection point and the geometry, stand is customizable, so people might want to see what they can build with pieces they already have and such.

I have spent a lot of time putting notes in the part list to the parts that can be arbitrarily colored or wherever there is different but specific alternate color possible with little to no visual impact. The model, even internally is designed with some off colored parts, mainly to make the building instructions clearer and the building experience nicer. It just feels wrong to stack only grey bricks, and so does having the internals as a colorful madness. I did pay attention to not choosing such colors for internal parts that would be expensive or hard to find, so even if you were to go with the part list as it is initially, it will not make for prohibitively more expensive order than if you optimize. And the building experience with the instructions will be the most complete, without need for remembering what color swaps you decided to do. But for people who want to tinker and optimize as much as possible, the notes should be helpful. Sure enough, both number of lots and cost can be reduced, especially considering bricks that you have already laying around and the difference between offers in specific stores.

On the last note, though, I just tried the BrickLink 'Buy All' option with all new parts for the default part list (without stand) and with the optimizing 'auto store select', given my location in Europe, I found that I can right now buy all the bricks from only 2 stores for the total price of approximately $170 + S&H. I was pleasantly surprised, as I was expecting higher cost :D I have probably paid at least twice that over the course of model development! :D

[Hold0511]

Its' like Christmas is coming early....

[phaelon]

I've been patiently been watching this thread for years @krisandkris12, waiting for the moment when you finally produced a working set of plans. It seems that day is almost here, and I'm very excited you are so close!

[Kristof]

I recognize you are one of the pioneers! Thanks for your patience and continuous support.

[danielwerner]

Any news? :D

[Kristof]

^ Insructions 100% complete, boy were there many details to touch up. I had a friend proof build it and together we discovered few more little issues that are now fixed, mostly a wrong part color in the instructions etc. I was working on part lists (there will be one for model and second one for stand) and I took some extra time putting notes to the parts that allows for some color swaps. And I also put together some helpful (hopefully) building notes in the intro to the instructions. Only the frontpage artwork now remains to be done, I am working together with a friend and excellent digital artist on that so I expect it to turn out great :D So I believe we are talking days here. 

[danielwerner]

Just now, krisandkris12 said:

^ Insructions 100% complete, boy were there many details to touch up. I had a friend proof build it and together we discovered few more little issues that are now fixed, mostly a wrong part color in the instructions etc. I was working on part lists (there will be one for model and second one for stand) and I took some extra time putting notes to the parts that allows for some color swaps. And I also put together some helpful (hopefully) building notes in the intro to the instructions. Only the frontpage artwork now remains to be done, I am working together with a friend and excellent digital artist on that so I expect it to turn out great :D So I believe we are talking days here. 

Awesome; can hardly wait. :) Have you decided on a reasonable price? Or will you go for the pay-what-you-want style?

[phaelon]

6 hours ago, krisandkris12 said:

^ Insructions 100% complete, boy were there many details to touch up. I had a friend proof build it and together we discovered few more little issues that are now fixed, mostly a wrong part color in the instructions etc. I was working on part lists (there will be one for model and second one for stand) and I took some extra time putting notes to the parts that allows for some color swaps. And I also put together some helpful (hopefully) building notes in the intro to the instructions. Only the frontpage artwork now remains to be done, I am working together with a friend and excellent digital artist on that so I expect it to turn out great :D So I believe we are talking days here. 

This is just so thrilling. Thanks for the update Kris!

[phaelon]

On 9/23/2018 at 3:27 PM, krisandkris12 said:

... My ultimate dream would be the Trade Federation core ship in scale with Venator, though that would yield probably the largest model of that ship ever built in Lego...

I just reread this post, and wanted to give you some numbers. From my (old) post about various ships in this scale, the Lucrehulk-class Battleship would be 147 studs in length and almost as wide, since it's essentially a giant circle. I think that would be an awesome build, but as you said, definitely large at 117cm (46 in).

[Kristof]

@danielwerner I decided to put a fix label of €16 on it.

@phaelon I never did the math but thats about the size I was expecting. I believe the biggest models so far (i.e. Thomas Benedikt or Paul Yperman builds) of the Lucrehulk are just over 1m in diameter. And they are ginormous. But who knows, maybe Venator instructions will allow me to buy a golden house and 30k bricks to build it :D Not to speak about ability to devote several thousand hours of work to it :D

One bad thing about such build is that it totally suppresses the advantages of this MIDI scale I keep cherishing :D

[Neodaemmerung]

Can't wait to start building this- the Venator is my favorite Star Wars capital ship.  How will you be taking payment? Paypal?  Also, in what format will you be offering the instructions?  Pdf I guess? 

All in all I am super stoked to work on this.  It is #3 in line right behind the clone wars gunship (I'm piecing together one of LEGO's versions) and another Jedi starfighter.  This venator will fit right in.
 

[Kristof]

@Neodaemmerung Likely paypal. Yes, pdf file including some build notes and then ~250 pages of very lego-set like instrucrions. Plus part list as a xml file of course.

[phaelon]

4 hours ago, krisandkris12 said:

@phaelon I never did the math but thats about the size I was expecting. I believe the biggest models so far (i.e. Thomas Benedikt or Paul Yperman builds) of the Lucrehulk are just over 1m in diameter. And they are ginormous. But who knows, maybe Venator instructions will allow me to buy a golden house and 30k bricks to build it :D Not to speak about ability to devote several thousand hours of work to it :D

One bad thing about such build is that it totally suppresses the advantages of this MIDI scale I keep cherishing :D

The problem with the actual scales of ships in the SW universe is the wide range. It makes it difficult to accurately portray them next to each other when they can be 10 times or 100 times bigger than other "common" ships that you still want to show detail.

I always considered the Lucrehulks to be the Death Stars of the First Trilogy, in that they were unevenly massive compared to all other ships of the era. Obviously the actual Death Star is a small moon (well, no moon, but still) in size, so it easily dwarfs everything else by orders of magnitude.

But even the SSD designs suffer because of how huge they have to be to show even the slightest detail on accompanying ISDs.

Edited October 1, 2018 by phaelon

[Neodaemmerung]

Any new updates? [mouthwatering intensifies]

 

[Brick-Wombat]

I'm cringing to think how large and expensive a to-scale Lucrehulk Battleship would be. Jorstad's design below is 22in x 20in x 9.5in. With Kris's design at 55 studs, that would put the Lucre at 153 studs. 

That would be 48in x 44in x 20in! 

Even if scaled to my smaller Venator (37 studs), that would be put the Lucre at 32in x 29in x 14in. 

Spoiler

 

Edited October 10, 2018 by K_W

[Kristof]

@Neodaemmerung I think this weekend should do it. I havent managed to complete it before my semester started so again I only have weekends somewhat free to work on it, which I didn't really anticipated when I said its few days from completion a week ago. This time, though, there seem to be nothing to hold me back.

 

@K_W Yeah, it would be ginormous project. In fact I used to have a WIP project for Lucrehulk in similar scale to Jorstad's, which I postponed and later canceled because of working on Venator instead. I really like this design except for the fact that it needs a lot of supports to stand like this. I would love to have a design where the semi ring would be self supporting, so you could easily handle it. But thats, of course, not considering the scale to go with my Venator. As such it would be hardly a desktop monstrosity requiring several people to move :D Not really fond of that thought myself.

 

[Kristof]

@Neodaemmerung @danielwerner @phaelon @Hold0511 @JoeChu1980 @Iperial_Fleet_Commander @Nikolas @Jackad7 @potoooooooo @Pcm979 @droid747 @ZackSchnepf

It's done.

 

[Neodaemmerung]

WHOAAAAAAAH  Christmas came early!