Kdapt-Preacher

There isn't enough information. No Chiss ship larger than a Clawcraft has ever been given an explicit size, and there's only ever been one official image of any of their capital ships (a single frame of Steadfast in one of the recent Thrawn comics), which doesn't give enough information to extrapolate the scale. I talked with Timothy Zahn about it a while ago, and he says that when he's writing the books he categorizes ships by relative power tier but not by size, so the information simply doesn't exist, even in his head. If that ever changes I'll be all over them, though.

Mild spoilers for Ahsoka episode 6 are below.

This thread is the only place I regularly post stuff. I've historically used Imgur solely for image hosting and have never engaged with any of the social media aspects of the site, so I'd never thought about anyone trying to follow me there. Most of the images from this thread are hosted there but are only accessible via the direct link. I've justs set a bunch of them to be publicly visible, but I seem to have hit a posting limit, so I'll go back through later and get the rest of them. Pretty nearly everything there is already going to be somewhere in this thread, but that'll at least let people see all the pictures in one place.

That's a good thought, but Stud.io just locked up when I asked it to make instructions for the whole ISD. 4800 pieces may be a little bit more than it was bargaining for! I'll try letting it crunch on that overnight some time and see if it gets anywhere. For the ISD2 mod it's probably not a huge deal, since I figure anybody looking at doing that is probably starting with an assembled copy of 75252 anyway, so they'd probably be better off with just a bunch of images like "remove all the bricks marked in red in this picture", or even just working off the Stud.io files directly (although I've had people who've had trouble opening Stud.io files for various reasons, so I'd want there to be a .pdf of some sort). The issue comes in more with something like the Errant Venture, where it'd be structurally almost (but not quite!) identical to 75252 but would require a complete rebuild to switch the entire hull to red, and it'd be a huge pain to try to figure out as you were building it whether each piece you were adding was going to be visible on the outside and needed to be swapped. If I'm ever planning to do that, I should just bite the bullet and recreate the instructions for the base set, so I'll have them and can use them for future projects. I mean, I already recreated the entire set in Stud.io, which was definitely more work than making instructions for it would be, so mostly my reluctance is just me being annoyed with myself that I didn't divide it into steps the first time around. I'll get around to it eventually. That'd be something to do on a long plane flight or something where I didn't have any other entertainment. Thank you! Australia is nice. There are a lot of very interesting crabs here! The answer to "Are you considering..." is almost always yes, LMAO. An Allegiance is kind of the obvious place to go, especially since it doesn't even have a hangar or anything, so in some sense it would be a pretty easy modification. But I don't have the parts or the space to build it, even at home, so I don't have any immediate means to pursue that further than the scale mockup in that image that I did a while ago.

Different ship—we’re talking about the First Order’s Resurgent-class SDs, which definitely are that big. The CIS Recusant-class is much more practical, since it’s basically all just a bunch of greebling around a central spine; I don’t have any structural concerns about that model. I do not like the upscaled versions, though. That was a grievous (ha!) sin on the part of TCW.

Engine detailing isn't final (and in particular the two largest engines there are identical, which they won't be on the final model), but this gives a sense of the size and positioning. The model suddenly feels much more solid now that the engines are there, maybe just because that was the last big gap in the hull. I'm going to have to shuffle some stuff around internally, since the frame that holds the engines in place needs to go right where one of the supports for the ventral hull currently is, but I think it's going to work out pretty well. I'm currently debating the shape of the fantail; the vast majority of Venator MOCs just make that basically a rectangle, but really it ought to taper a little bit. Not sure yet whether the added complexity of that is going to be worth the slightly more accurate shape.

Quick and dirty comparison of the two different hangar styles, with RotS on the left and TCW on the right. Whether that section is flat or angled is a fairly subtle distinction, but it implies that that area is constructed quite differently on the two versions. Note that this is definitely not the final version of either of those--I haven't done any of the greebling on the hull yet, and I'm not very satisfied with the TCW doors at the moment. That right angle in there is necessary to attach the door but makes it look bad when opened. I might end up having the doors just sit in place via gravity rather than actually being attached. Not very elegant, but it would work well enough here, I think. I'll continue workshopping it.

Yes, I've been planning to post some modifications to 75252 to make it align better with both an ISD1 and an ISD2 for a while. There are pictures of my ISD2 octuple turret design somewhere in this thread, and last year some time I did about half of the work that I'd like to in reworking 75252's terrace area to match the ISD2's gun pit structure thing. 75252 is already a pretty good match for an ISD1 and I don't think it needs *too* much modification, but I'd like to add the heavier brim armor and a few other features that differentiate between it and the ISD2, and there are a few other tweaks that I think it could use (like, it has a couple of spots that would benefit from the new 6x2 wedge plates that didn't exist when it was designed, for example). Honestly, the biggest hurdle to publishing that is figuring out how to make the instructions for it--I already have a Stud.io file of 75252, but I really don't want to have to go through that and recreate the entire instruction manual, and I'm not sure how else to do it. Maybe just a bunch of screenshots with labels like "remove all the bricks marked in red" or something, but that's not a very clean way to handle it. I would definitely include Chimaera, since that isn't much additional work. Besides the hull paint it has a couple other differences from the regular ISD that would need to be included. We'll have to see what it looks like in Ahsoka, assuming it shows up--the official word in Rebels is that it's an ISD1 structurally that's been modified with some ISD2 features, most prominently the weapons; but at the moment Disney only has one screen-grade ISD model (they've been using the ISD1 they made for Rogue One for every appearance since then), so I'll be curious to see how much VFX work they put into translating that.

Yeah, the NR cruiser is on my radar. I'm going to wait until the show is over so I know what information we're working with, but it looks like it would make a very nice model. I haven't done the math for the scaling myself yet, but I agree that it's in the ballpark of 1000 meters. We should be cautious of comparing it to Home One, though, since there are a bunch of issues around how larger that's supposed to be. I'd probably start with the scene in the first episode of the Eta-class shuttle entering the cruiser's hangar; there ought to be enough information there to make a pretty good guess. On the subject of Ahsoka, I also rather like that big hyperspace ring. It looks like it's about the right size to dock an ISD, and I've been thinking about what that model would need to look like. The ring itself is easy enough, but the question is whether you could make it sturdy enough to support the whole ISD model and just have the visible stand at the bottom of the ring, or whether you'd need to extend at least part of the ISD's stand high enough to let the ring ride underneath. I think having the ISD's stand be like 20cm taller would look kinda ridiculous, but if it was just resting on the ring it would be hard to keep it from tipping over. I imagine we'll get more information about that in the next couple of episodes.

CIS ships, definitely. I have Stud.io files open for a Munificent and a Lucrehulk core ship already, although both of those are in very early stages and not even really prototypes yet. (Although I should note that I have files open for a lot of things, and some of them have been open for literally years, so don't read too much into. But I'm aware of them and do have plans.) The Resurgent is a beautiful ship, but it's huge, almost twice as long as the ISD, and the flatter proportions and the negative space near the bow would make it a very difficult model structurally, so I don't think it's practical for the near future. I might eventually get there, but we're a long way off from that. I'd definitely want to have both a Lucrehulk and an RotJ-scaled Home One done before trying anything else in the 3km range. I dunno. My plans somewhat exceed my ability to actually produce models. I mean, I'm talking about 3km ships when I don't even have a 1km ship actually published yet. We'll see what happens! I am eternally optimistic. But don't hold your breath, especially if you've been waiting for a Dreadnought since I first said I was working on one back some time in early 2021...

Your wish is my command: The ISD is comically larger. 1600 vs 1137 meters doesn't sound like a huge difference on paper, but when you factor in the Venator's narrower frame it ends up being a *much* smaller ship, maybe 20% of the ISD's volume. The upside of that, of course, is that this model will be much easier to fit on a shelf.

Side hangar size and positioning. The doors do slide open and there's enough room to land the Twilight in there. Of course I'm not sure you could really see it without shining a flashlight in there; the display value is pretty marginal. But it's the thought that counts! As of today this has finally passed the Class 4 container transport's piece count and is officially the largest model I've designed, so that's a bit of a milestone. It's going to be a fairly complex assembly process, I think, just in terms of the number of separate units attaching onto this central core. I'm going to have to put a fair bit of thought into what order the sections need to go on. I think the order is going to be something like central center --> dorsal center --> ventral center --> stand --> ventral hull --> hangars --> engines --> greebly panels --> dorsal hull --> command tower, but there's going to have to be some finicking there.

Thank you! Yes. I build all my models--Stud.io is great, but I'm never fully confident in the engineering until I've seen it IRL, and I always catch stuff in-person that I didn't notice digitally. However, I've recently moved to Australia and no longer have easy access to my parts collection, so it'll be a while before I can do so. Once I'm finished with this I may go ahead and put the Stud.io file up for download so folks can play around with it if they want, but I'll have to hold off on officially publishing it for at least a couple of months, I think.

Basic structure of the ventral surface. Obviously lots of greebly work to do on the central bit and in the hangar, but I think this is about what the ventral hull armor needs to look like. This is the RotS version; the TCW version is very similar from this view but will have the brim notch much further back.

The issue is that it needs to move on multiple axes. The doors both slide laterally and rotate slightly to make the opening wider towards the rear of the ship. There are definitely ways to make that happen, but they all require some kind of multiply-jointed assembly. If I was really in this for the play features I could probably thicken the ship a bit and cram it in there, but I don't think it buys me much. The doors for the side hangars may slide open, though. I've been screwing with that and haven't come to any conclusions yet. It's easy to make them slide into the side of the ship, but the but somewhat harder to add a way to slide them out again without disassembling half the model. They'd need a teeny handle or something, which doesn't mesh very well with the greeblies in that area. I'm going to continue poking at it. I'm also including the small bow doors at the very front of the main hangar, but I need to find a clip of them actually opening to decide what to do with them--there's plenty of room for a hinge there, but I think they're supposed to slide sideways, which there isn't room for (I don't think there's room on the actual ship either; they'd have to collapse into sections or something). Probably they'll just be removable on the model. That opening is tiny, like 2x4 studs, so I'm not super worried about intricate functionality there. In related news, I've found that my Charger c70 model doesn't quite fit into the Venator's ventral bay the way it ought to. There's some discrepancy in canon around the size of that ship, and I suspect that TCW had it scaled to 115 meters (which is what it probably ought to be) rather than the word-of-God 135 meters (which is what my model is). As a result I've slightly shrinkified my model to get it down to 115 meters. I'm not sure how I'll publish this; I think I still like the 135-meter model a bit more, especially around the engines, so I'll probably keep that as the 'main' one, but maybe I'll just add the smaller version to that same Rebrickable page with a note about the different sizes. EDIT: No, wait, did my math wrong. The new model is still bigger than 115 meters. It's closer and fits in the hangar, though, so good enough. I'm actually kinda warming up to the new version; that 1x5 plate didn't exist when I designed the original model, and it's doing a lot of work here. I might just replace the existing Consular models with this one. I'll have to think about it.