Kdapt-Preacher

And also, that $25 in 2010 is equivalent to $32 today, and $30 in 2012 is now almost $37. Inflation's a bitch. People tend not to think about how much of a difference that makes even over relatively short time periods.

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:

And of course the UCS Gunship in 2021 would've been perfect a year later. But you know what they say: close only counts with horseshoes and hand grenades.

No, there are no such patterns. I've posted this before, but the record for anniversary sets is: TPM: 0 sets in 2009, 1 set in 2019 AotC: 0 sets in 2012 RotS: 0 sets in 2015 ANH: 2 sets in 2007, 1 set in 2017 ESB: 1 set in 2000, 5 sets in 2010, 2 sets in 2020 RotJ: 3 sets in 2003, 3 sets in 2013 That looks random. OT movies get about the same number of sets in anniversary years as they do in non-anniversary ones, and PT movies historically get nothing. ESB's 30th anniversary in 2010 coincided with a Hoth wave, but that should happen occasionally by chance; there's a cluster of sets around one movie or another almost every year, so if LEGO completely ignores the anniversaries a random distribution would have that happen to land on an anniversary roughly every tenth year, which is about what we see here. There's no pattern. I would invite everyone to bear in mind this xkcd cartoon about trying to make predictions based on historical trends.

This is categorically untrue, LMAO. Merchandisability is a huge factor in deciding what content they create. Din Djarin's new ship doesn't have a bubble canopy just for Baby Yoda because it makes any kind of sense in the story, it's because Baby Yoda is the most marketable character Star Wars has had in decades and they want the merch to show him off. The direct box office income from the movies (or the subscription fees from Disney+, for the shows) only accounts for a couple percent of the total revenue associated with the Star Wars brand; Disney cares vastly more about the merchandising. Obviously they aren't shaping their decisions around the sales of a single LEGO set, but in aggregate, yes, they absolutely will build shows around what they think will sell toys. For an even sharper example, look at the Ewoks cartoon from the 80s--that show had less than zero narrative reason to exist and really didn't make a whole lot of sense in the context of Star Wars, but they sold a lot of Ewok dolls, so that's what we got.

Why on earth would you think a Star Wars forum wouldn't have people complaining about Star Wars? If people don't talk about aspects that they don't like, how would anything ever improve? That goes for any topic, not just Star Wars. Anything you aren't allowed to criticize isn't fandom, it's religion. I use the blue and white skin for BD-1 in Fallen Order anyway, so for my own part I'm delighted to see the blue one here first. Presumably the default skin will come out at some later point. Although I do feel the need to point out that that hasn't always held--I had figured CB-23 would be low-hanging fruit to include in one of the Resistance sets since they'd gone to the trouble of making three new molds for BB series droids by that point, but apparently not. You never can tell.

Ah, yeah, that would complicate things. I haven't done anything fancy with mine; that's just the stock set. At some point in the nearish future I'm going to post something like an upgrade kit for it, with one set to bring it slightly better in line with the detailing on the ISD1 and another as a full conversion to an ISD2 (and maybe another for an Interdictor-class), but I haven't done all that work yet.

Nothing fancy. I took the middle sections off so I could grab it by the internal frame and just put it in the car. I wouldn't want to carry it any truly long distance like that, but a couple hundred feet between the parking lot and the convention center isn't too much of an issue. Although I did sit in the back of the car so I could keep a hand on it in case we braked hard or something--I'm pretty confident that it's sturdy enough that that wouldn't really be a problem, but there's no reason to play those kinds of games if you don't have to.

I've just finished setting up some of my ships to display at Atlanta Brick Con. Anybody local should come down and see them in person!

LEGO does throw out some seriously weird ones sometimes. Cad Bane's ship is definitely a more sensible choice than the Bounty Hunter Gunship from TCW or the Wookiee Gunship from Rebels (which they made twice despite it having literally 6 seconds of screentime), although it's also a much larger set than either of those.

I hate to be the guy who brings up the prices, but holy cow, 1022 pieces for 160 Euro / 180 US? What can the set possibly look like to justify that?

The horns are part of her face print. But yeah, that could've been done better. Her skin tone isn't really right either.

All of the heavy bits and everything mounted on the midline, including the dorsal cityscape, the engines, and the ceiling of the ventral docking bay, run parallel to the ground (luckily!). There will definitely be beams running diagonally along the length of the ship like that, but I think they're more likely to just be effectively tension cables supporting a flat spine than major structural spars in themselves, just because there isn't really anything that would need to sit on them. Also, FYI, these diagrams that we've been using are actually a really bad drawing of the ship; they're from the original Essential Guide to Vehicles and Vessels, which was a.... reasonable..... attempt at an encyclopedia when it was written in 1996 but took a pretty casual approach to things like details and proportions. For example, that drawing has nine engines, because that's how many they claim the ship has, despite the fact that anyone watching the movie can see perfectly clearly that there are 13, and it shows the cityscape and bridge tower as several times larger and bulkier than they actually are (they were trying to convince people that the ship is only 8km long rather than 17.6, so they more than doubled the sizes of the features that could be compared to ISDs). When I've finished my measuring and 3D modeling (which will probably be next week some time as I've been busy IRL recently) I'll post the model here so everybody can play with a more accurate schematic. I like the idea of building it in sections like that in principle, but I have no idea how I would put that into practice. I think the odds of this thing supporting itself are only middling even if it does have strong, solid beams running all the way through it, and without that I can't really imagine it standing upright. If every section had its own stand and there were vertical columns every meter or so then yeah, it would stand, but the bottom of the ship would have to be close to solid columns to such a degree that you could hardly see the hull. If they were every square foot, then I don't think you could even really build a lower hull; it would just be columns. Honestly, I just don't think this thing is going to be practically transportable no matter what you do with it. I'm sure that there exists a method of building it in sections that could be disassembled, but there's no way around the fact that you would need more than one semi truck to haul the thing, and I would guess something like a week of work for multiple people setting it up and breaking it down, and that's if you can find somewhere to take it in the first place--I would guess that to house it appropriately you'd want something like 15,000 square feet of display space, which is a hell of an ask even for a major convention (and conventions would almost never be able to offer you that much lead time to set it up, too). Ultimately, given how many other difficulties there are in even thinking about transporting it, I don't think it makes sense to prioritize that as a design goal when it's not even certain that it can be built as a static model. If I wanted a practical model to carry around with me I wouldn't be building a 40-foot Star Destroyer. The cable stayed bridge design is a good one, though. The top set of diagonal beams in the drawing I posted fill basically that role. There'll be a couple of feet vertically between the main spar level (probably level with the midline of the ship) and the 'roof' of the underside of the cityscape, so there should be plenty of room in there for those supports. I'm going to try making them with LEGO beams first, but I have way less objection to paracord than I do to steel, so if push comes to shove and it doesn't look like it'll hold I would consider reinforcing with that.

Forgot to respond to the other half of this. Yeah, I'm fully open to increasing the number of pillars and the precise placements of the support beams. It may very well make more sense to have an even number of columns and major beams in the wide area of the ship and only transition to a single central one once it gets down into the narrower part of the bow. I'm hoping that the 3D modeling will help me work out the weight distribution and what the optimal positions will be.

I don't think we actually need any vertical support where the secondary spars are. There shouldn't be any weight running along the dorsal midline of the ship like that forwards of the cityscape section, which will be built on basically just a flat platform (more or less). The only thing there is the line where the two hull plates meet, and the panel construction of those means that they won't be resting on a center spar (like they are in the UCS ISD, for example). I think your suspension bridge analogy is right; the only thing we need from them is to hold up the spine. I have a vision for how that bit could work but I'm not sure I'm articulating it well; I need to actually mock it up. Yeah, I know. There's a lot less going on on the bottom of the ship than there is on top, though, so overall I'm not very worried about that. The smooth hull sections are comparatively very light, only around 1 lb/square ft, which shouldn't be much of a problem from a structural perspective, and if the large horizontal beams are sufficiently sturdy the lower hull panels can basically just hang from them without requiring as much additional support as the upper hull will. Ah, I remember seeing that thread a while back when it was posted. I know that a steel frame would make this far more practical, but I'm going to see how far I can get without one. Unquestionably, it would absolutely have to have a steel frame to be transportable, but I'm not setting that as a requirement for the moment. Even if it could be transported, I don't know where you could possibly transport it to; the difference between 5 and 12 meters is pretty significant in terms of the amount of space and time you'd need to get it set up at a convention or something, and you'd need also bring some kind of dedicated viewing platform to even see the top surface anyway. Realistically, ( I mean, for a given definition of 'realistically'...) I can't see any world where this is set up as anything other than a permanent exhibit somewhere.

It's going to have to be something like that, although I think that putting the main structural members at angles to the spine like that would be a lot harder than that concept makes it look. Those diagonal secondary spars are fully twelve feet long, so they're going to need support themselves, and if they're supporting any significant fraction of the weight of the ship there'll be quite lot of force concentrated at those joints. The vision that I currently have for the cross-section (I don't think I'd go so far as to call it a plan yet, since I haven't really done any of the math) is something like this. Those correspond to vertical columns and main spinal members (the purple squares, in front view) 40 studs thick, and secondary horizontal spars 20 studs thick. Obviously there would have to be structure supporting the bottom hull as well, but I'm omitting that here so you can see the main supports more easily. Keep in mind that this is the absolute widest part of the ship, and it tapers fast, so by the time we get to the next set of columns six feet or so in front of this it'll already be narrower than the outer two columns in this diagram; the outermost pair of the next two columns will be farther inwards. The whole smooth hull surface consists of a series of separate 80x80 panels, so that'll be supported by a network of small struts that probably won't look exactly like what I've drawn there, but you get the idea. The supports under the cityscape region will depend on exactly what that ends up looking like, but basically the top part of the frame is just going to be a platform that I can sit that on.

Returning to the original point of this thread, here's #165, the XS stock light freighter! This is the same version from the pictures I posted a couple days ago; I decided I was satisfied with it. Six months from now I might wake up in the middle of the night with an idea for how to do it better, but it's not going to get any better from continued poking in the short term. This means that I'm now effectively finished with the SW:TOR player ships sub-project, which started with the Fury-class Interceptor almost a year ago: Speaking of which, three weeks from today is the 1-year anniversary of my uploading my first MOC. It seems like I should do something to celebrate that, but I don't know what. I don't think I'm going to finish the Interdictor in time, honestly, but I'll probably get something at least.

I have a lot of thoughts about a lot of the responses here. I think my biggest takeaway right now is that I need to step back and do some sketching and 3D modeling to nail down exactly what this thing is going to have to look like before I can make informed decisions about the structure. For example, right now my plan is to base the sides on the 9-40-41 Pythagorean triple, which makes tying everything into the frame very easy, but that makes the ship about 3% narrower than I think it ought to be. On one hand, 3% isn't very much, and I think it would take somebody a lot of effort to ever notice that small a discrepancy, but on the other hand, my motto has always been 'death before compromise', and it seems like if I'm going to put this kind of effort into something it really ought to be right... but I need to go back to all the images of the original studio model and other depictions of the ship and really measure things out to decide what all the angles are going to look like and whatnot, since the choice of Pythagorean triple (if it even works out to one) will be a major factor in deciding where the struts need to go. I'll get back to you all. This is good to know. I've vaguely heard of LeoCAD but didn't know that it was optimized for larger models. I'll almost certainly end up needing this, at least to load the thing for renders eventually. It's 200 of every part, as far as I know. Getting stuff directly from LEGO would be fantastic, but I think it would have to be through the LUGBulk program or something similar. Bricks & Pieces is unlikely to get me anywhere fast. That's a useful concept. I'm going to make a (non-LEGO) 3D model of the thing so I can plan out where major beams will need to go. My current thought is that the smooth hull sections will be principally supported by beams running perpendicular to the spine of the ship, but I don't know whether that'll really end up making sense or not. I think the two greatest structural challenges here are supporting the strip of detailing in the groove at the edge of the ship where the upper and lower hulls meet (which looks tiny, but is about 20 studs high and 1000 studs long, and will be densely greeblied with small parts, so it'll be heavy) and supporting the engines in the back (there'll have to be a column in the middle of the fantail section, but I think that'll be the greatest concentration of weight overall, and it's the thinnest part of the ship, so there may be limited room for beams). You're almost certainly right that bending long straight sections into shape is probably the easiest way to do this, but from a philosophical perspective I'm not sure how much I like that. It's almost certainly going to be the case that there'll be some flexing going on here (especially since it's looking like getting that perfect angle on the hull may involve using something that's close enough to a Pythagorean triple to work perfectly in practice but technically isn't actually in click--I'm looking at some combinations that end up being off by 0.03 studs or something like that, which would never be noticeable here), but there's illegal and there's illegal... I recognize that my reluctance to accede to practicality makes me in many ways a poor candidate for this project, LMAO, but I suppose if I was limiting myself to goals that make sense I wouldn't be seriously considering this. Yeah, I've thought about that. I think it would be a great approach if it could be done, and if we were working in sheet metal or something that would be clearly the best way to do it, but at present I haven't come up with a vision for how to make it happen in practice. From a design perspective, the lower hull panel would have to be ridiculously strong, since it'd have the weight of the whole side of the ship trying to buckle it, and the fact that that section is mounted at odd angles to everything else (in both dimensions) will make it hard to reinforce. From a building perspective, it would be very hard to actually assemble the thing if the hull isn't made in small sections--it would be immensely difficult just to lift and maneuver the (minimum!) 12-foot-long hull sections, especially if the model couldn't support itself while that was happening, whereas a more typical frame is more amenable to being assembled in chunks at least small enough to lift without a crane. My thought at the moment is that keeping the whole structural frame oriented along the typical LEGO axes and limiting the parts that have to be connected via turntables and whatnot to relatively non-load-bearing sections will save a lot of headaches even if it's less efficient from a strength-to-weight perspective, but I'm open to being convinced on that point. Hmm. My gut reaction was that a beam 40 studs tall is crazy overkill, but honestly I have no idea whether it really is or not. Certainly I would trust it not to go anywhere, which is more than I can say about most of the other designs I've thought about. Those 16x16 plates cost about four times as much as a 1x16 Technic beam and certainly provide more strength oriented vertically like that than 4 Technic beams would, although they also weigh more than four times as much, and that beam design would be much harder to connect to the rest of the structure than a more traditional vertically-oriented Technic spar (especially given that the sides of the ship mean that there're going to be a lot of bits coming into this at odd angles). It's something to think about, certainly. Once I've done my 3D modeling I'll have a more accurate sense of how much weight is going to be on these things and how long a span I'll them to be able to bridge. I'm delighted that this is getting as much attention as it has--there's plenty of room in this thing for multiple minds to work on it, and I need all the advice I can get. Keep it coming! Don't worry, my family's got that bit covered. But everybody over here is so supportive, it really seems like an even better idea than it did a couple of days ago...

That looks like the same design from the Advent Calendar, just replacing the red parts with grey or tan.

Oh, I see--the two 5L liftarms, right? As long as you have a full stud of space in between them (which you do), you shouldn't have any problem pulling them back out (as long as you can physically fit your finger in there, anyway, which you ought to be able to unless you have hands like a gorilla). If you're worried about it, you could attach those parts from the outside with any of the Pin 3L variants, so you can pull the pins back out directly.

I'm not sure I see which part is the problem. With the axle passing all the way through the block like that, what stops you from just pushing it back out from the other side?

Nah, the car's in the other garage. Sandcrawler's the only issue. And that could maybe live outside? We patched the hole in the roof. But I still have to come up with at least probably half a million dollars for bricks. Disney, if you're listening.... EDIT: No, wait. I forgot that I live in a floodplain. My garage is not the right place for this. I need a different plan.

This got pretty positive responses over in the Technic subforum. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this could actually be done (somewhat to my family's horror).

Thank you! I know you're right, I just don't know what else to do about it. I have a couple hundred thousand bricks on hand, so I'm used to being able to immediately prototype pretty much anything I want, but I don't have remotely the right assortment to make a serious play at something like this. If I took apart all my Star Wars sets I could get together a couple hundred liftarms, but even that wouldn't get me a proper test here--I'd need to build probably a 12-foot section to really be confident that I'd tested it thoroughly. If I really get deep into this (which I'm honestly not sure I will yet; at the moment I'm still mostly doing math to try to figure out what this would even look like) I'll probably buy a few hundred dollars worth of Technic panels so I can do that, but in the meantime this is the best plan I have. That Yamato is quite the build, and I think it's a fair comparison. My current plan is to do the entire smooth hull sections as a series of 80x80 panels made of 16x16 plates (i.e., 5x5 plates as the outer layer connected by 4x4 plates as the inner layer, for 2 plates' thickness over the majority of the surface). I've already tested that and am comfortable that those panels are light and strong enough to form the hull--they're not structural anyway, so they just have to hold themselves together and not sag much. The whole interior of the ship will be as hollow as I can make it; there doesn't have to be anything in there except whatever support struts the hull needs (probably something like a horizontal beam every 80 studs or so, to align with the hull plates). As a result, the only dense areas of the ship will be the top cityscape region and the rear surface around the engines, and I'm optimistic that it wouldn't weigh as much as your estimate. However, those areas have extremely dense detailing and will involve a crapton of tiny parts. I'll need to mock up a section of that so I can get a better estimate of how many, but there's no question that it's gonna be a big number. That's a useful page--thanks! Although given that that bridge did collapse I'm not sure how closely I should follow their engineering advice, LMAO. And yeah, my computer may be an issue--I already tested that and Stud.io became largely unusable after around 600,000, so this would probably have to be done in sections. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it; I'm not yet certain that I'm going to get that far. It'll almost certainly be outside my budget, ultimately, but we'll have to see. It's important to me that it be possible to build, but much less important that anyone actually do so, so for practical purposes I'm content with considering this a digital art piece. But if I do finish the design, I'll definitely at least bounce the idea off LEGO and Disney... Somebody already tried and failed to Kickstart construction of a 13-foot Executor, but this one would be way cooler. My current computer definitely won't be able to handle the entire model, but my brother's in CS, has access to supercomputers, and is bribable, so I think I'll be able to work something out. Plus, honestly, by the time I finish this computer technology will probably have advanced significantly from what we have today.

It's a guess, but a reasonably informed one. The smooth areas of the hull will have a combined weight of about 400 to 450 lbs depending on the amount of detailing, but spread over about 200 square feet of surface area, so the weight on any individual beam in those sections will be fairly low. The dense cityscape areas on top of the hull will weigh quite a bit more (maybe twice as much?), spread over a smaller (but still quite large) surface area. I have no idea what the exact numbers will be, but I would think under 10 lbs per square foot. There may be a few specific areas with greater weights, such as the points where the engines are attached, but my goal would be that the cityscape itself be fairly rigid, such that the weight of the whole thing was supported principally by the vertical columns rather than anywhere near the middle of the spans. I would say that I'm not really worried about physically breaking pieces unless I do something *really* dumb with them, but since the total magnitudes of forces here are pretty large I'd like to play it safe, especially since my ability to physically build and test anything at this scale is highly limited. I'll play with the beam calculator and see what I can make of it.