Kdapt-Preacher

Mel Miniatures does good research and is viable as a source in cases where few good official images exist. For some ships with little information available they've occasionally made interpolations that I don't agree with, but that's more a question of personal taste in most cases. For the MC40a, since it originated in a video game there is an official canon (well, Legends, but you know what I mean) 3D model to get the proportions from. The pics on the Wookieepedia page for the ship class aren't very good, but there are better angles on other articles; here's a good clear top view: https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Lulsla_(MC40a_light_cruiser)?file=Lulsla.jpg The quality of the model is about what you'd expect from a game that came out in 1994, though, so you have a lot of wiggle room there to interpret what few details there are. Also, that whole series is pretty liberal about ship designs compared to higher-resolution sources (check out what their Nebulon-B frigates look like as an example), so even specific stuff like the engine placements could be moved around a fair bit without losing the spirit of the thing, especially since the drawing in Starships and Speeders looks almost nothing like the game version (and Starships and Speeders has some serious problems of its own; a lot of its images are very loose interpretations of the source material). 500-600 meters is a decent range for what it is, but keep in mind too that a lot of Mon Cala ships are individually built rather than identical series, so it's totally possible that there are a range of sizes and configurations for different ships all falling under the general class "MC40a". It adds up to a lot of flexibility for you to play with scales and techniques until you land on something you're satisfied with.

That's going to be a pretty rough conversion. The MC40a is a much larger ship than the MC30c, about 50% longer and proportionately wider; and even if you were fudging the scale so your model was the same length as the original one, the shape is different enough that you're going to end up rebuilding basically the entire thing. To be properly to scale with this model, the MC40a should be in about 10 studs wide on the front part with the raised bits, and 18 or 20 studs wide on the rear half (rough ballpark, I haven't drawn out the diagram, so do the actual math before relying on that), which gives you a lot more room to play with. That's big enough that you can put a hinge plate in there and do whatever you want with it.

I have never seen that helmet before and have no actual inside knowledge of any kind, but my uninformed guess is that it's a recent custom, and the weirdness is because it's meant to be this specific storm commando or something based on the same armor. Most depictions of the storm commandos have them in black versions of regular scout helmets, but some have that more vertical mouth and lack the bulge around the lower back, which would be a pretty good fit for your helmet there.

OK, update on the photos: Apparently Imgur detected an unspecified violation of their content policy on my account, which hadn't uploaded any pictures in the previous six months, and they reacted to that by deleting everything I'd ever posted there without even so much as notifying me that it had happened. Their support people are unable to tell me what the alleged violation was or how to prevent it in the future, and they say they're unable to recover any of the removed content, and effectively that if I have a problem with that I should megabluck off and die. (And then week after this conversation they sent me a spam email celebrating the tenth anniversary of my creating the account.) So I have deleted my Imgur account, and I would very strongly encourage anyone else who's using them to back up all your stuff and then find a different image hosting service. I've restored the main render on the first post of this thread, but I'll have to see about replacing all the other image links; I imagine I still have most of those files saved locally in various places, but it'd be a huge pain to have to track them all down again.

Something seems to be wrong with my Imgur account, which is why most of the photos in this thread are currently dead links, for anyone wondering. I'm working on sorting it out.

Hmmm. 3386 is a good idea. I'd been thinking about a vertical clip so the B-wing could fly 'upright' with the knife blade downwards, but holding it horizontally like that is about as good. I definitely like the bucket and clip better for the X-wing, but they're all just difficult to make readable at this size. It's pure happy coincidence that the TIE fighters happen to work out as nicely as they do; basically no other starfighter is that cooperative.

Yeah, I think Guam is going to be great. Tons of crabs out there! The timing is just very awkward. As for the B-wing, the knife piece (44658) is about the right size. The stand would have to be kind of comically bulky compared to the ship, of course...

There's good precedent for new helmets in battle packs specifically, too. The ARF trooper in 2011, ARC trooper in 2012, First Order officer cap in 2016, patrol trooper in 2018, Praetorian Guard in 2019, Imperial commando from just earlier this year, etc., plus 4-LOM's head in 2017, and the macrobinoculars from the 501st BP last year, which is another one that the clone crowd has wanted for a long time. Being in a battle pack definitely does not mean they won't do Bacara justice.

Aaaaaand..... I'm moving to Guam. Immediately. Still in the US, technically, but no better than Australia was from a LEGO standpoint (actually worse, since there are LEGO stores in Australia and there aren't any in Guam. And the cost of shipping anything will be ridiculous). I'm not going to have time to finish the Venator or probably anything else. Sigh. IDK. I'll try to come up with some better solution so I can continue building MOCs in the future; I've hated not really being able to work on this project for the last two years, but it doesn't look like it's going to immediately improve.

The skirt piece might be better, but it still doesn't address the biggest issue with the Royal Guards, which is that their robes are supposed to conceal their arms. Even though the skirt piece is probably closer to a literal representation of the uniform, I'm not sure it conveys the overall impression as well. It would make them look like the Praetorians. I can't see LEGO doing it, but the better solution IMO would be to give them either a new headpiece that extends down over the torso and legs (like the old ghost minifigures) or a bespoke cape piece that wraps around the body more than the current ones do.

Not in the original Thrawn Trilogy, but more so in Outbound Flight and the other media around that. By the time of Heir to the Empire he's been an Imperial for decades and has largely worked out his ethical issues, but the younger versions of him have more of that angle. Depending on how they played it, it could have been less about the survivors not being believed and more about them just not having any useful information. The Vong aren't particularly communicative; you could easily have a storyline where the TCW crew encounters and fights a YV scout ship but never really learns much about them other than that they're a previously-unencountered aggressive faction. In more LEGO-related discussion, this is still the 2024 thread. Is a 2025 thread going to open at some point?

Ah, perfect--that's just what I needed. Odd that this is necessary, since it seems like something Studio could've addressed on their end more easily than requiring a third-party tool, but at least there's a solution. Thank you!

At some point in the last year or so, BrickLink (or possibly LDraw, or possibly both) have updated their ID numbers for some common parts. Most prominently, #3023 Plate 1x2 has split into 3023a and 3023b to reflect mold variants, but something similar has been done to #3069 Tile 1x2 and several other pieces as well. That's all well and good, but the result is that now my older Stud.io files that have all the 1x2 plates as just #3023 rather than #3023b can no longer be imported into BrickLink because it doesn't recognize the pieces. This is an issue because I've published several hundred MOCs on Rebrickable with Stud.io files for instructions and now I have people messaging me about the files being broken. I can fix this by going through every file manually and replacing all the existing parts with the new variants, but that would take days of work. Is there any way to convert them en masse, or to make BrickLink translate #3023 to #3023b automatically (which seems like how this ought to work, anyway)? Thanks!

Celebrating the release of Skeleton Crew (only a week late), we have #208, the Onyx Cinder! Pretty straightforward little model, but I think it's ended up being a pretty good representation of the ship. In more substantial news, after more than 18 months away I am finally back in the US and have access to my parts collection again, so at long last I should be able to start making progress on MOCs again! I have a lot of IRL work to do at the moment, so it's not going to be an immediate giant burst of stuff, but I'm optimistic that I'll be able to get things rolling again in the near future. It's past time to get the Venator finished.

There's a lot of stuff that could maybe be done to make it sturdier, but the spacing is very awkward. To achieve the 12-degree angle between segments the clips are offset relative to each other by half a plate (not half a stud, half a plate) both horizontally and vertically, which isn't trivial to achieve with anything other than clips. I think this will hold up, but of course there's no way to know for sure if it'll hold without testing it IRL. Have to see.