Kdapt-Preacher

Thanks everyone for your advice--lots of useful points here! This guy's 10-meter crane was one of the things that convinced me that this was possible. I think that's an even harder use case than I'm envisioning, since that's an unsupported truss spanning almost the entire length of what the Executor would be, and it has to be able to lift itself as well. I'll keep looking for other large examples. My plan is for the parts of the frame extending out to the sides to be built along the same lines as the main spine (whatever that design ends up being). There'll be more columns off to the sides at the widest parts, so it shouldn't have to extend unsupported very far. The upside of the size of the ship is that there's tons of internal room to hide the supports; even at the narrowest parts of the extreme edge of the ship the internal space is still around 30 studs tall, so the frame can be quite sturdy all the way out to the ends. Right now I'm thinking that a combination of frames and panels will probably be the most workable solution. Good to know about the 11x15 frames--I don't think those are available in large enough quantities to be the main components of the build anyway, but I'll avoid using them for serious structural applications. I absolutely agree with you, but I don't have the pieces available to do anything about it at the moment. I have a couple hundred thousand LEGO pieces on hand, but not very many of them are Technic. This would be far easier if I could just build stuff and physically test whether it was strong enough to support a useful amount of weight. Once I have a truss design I'm fairly comfortable with I'll probably order enough parts to build a two or three meter section to test with, but even that'll be a couple hundred dollar investment at least. Ooooh, the turntables are a fantastic idea. I had already been thinking that 'fractal' supports might well be necessary, since at this scale even the diagonal support braces will themselves be something like a meter long, but I wasn't sure how to join them with connections stronger than one or two pins. The turntables should work very well for that. I'll see what I can do in terms of arches. That may be what I end up with by default, with multiple levels of triangular bracing at different angles tending to form that shape. Those Mindstorms base plates are an interesting suggestion. That's not a piece I was previously aware of. Unfortunately, regardless of cost, I don't think they're available in the kind of quantities this build would require. At 19 studs long it would take 84 of them end-to-end to stretch the length of the ship, and there are only about 700 of them for sale on BrickLink, so even if I bought literally all of them I still couldn't make a very thick beam (and that's without any of the side supports). But the 5x11 panels are more readily available (about 70,000 on BL), so I think those could work. With sufficient triangular bracing I think they'll be pretty strong. Ooh, the train section is a good idea. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right, there're probably a lot of serious bridges over there, and I think that's the closest analog to what I'm aiming for here. And yeah, I freely admit that making the frame out of steel would absolutely make more sense--it would be cheaper, stronger, and probably physically easier to build, given that I already have access to a bunch of box girders and welding gear--but it always seemed to me that using metal kinda defeats the point of building with LEGO. Given that I definitely can't afford the pieces to build this IRL anyway, I feel like I might as well go whole hog with it. Were I to actually build it, it would stand on a flat concrete garage floor. I was assured when this house was built that the garage foundations are strong enough to park main battle tanks, so hopefully that won't be a problem. I want everything above that to be made of LEGO. This is a starship, so the model itself will be elevated on support columns, which I intend to be maybe five or six feet tall (so the midline of the ship is roughly at eye level). The ship itself will be mostly just a thin layer of plates laying over the Technic frame, so it won't have any structure without the frame to sit on. I would love to design it so the frame could come apart in sections to transport, but if that isn't possible it's not the end of the world. This is an interesting idea as well. I'm going to have to have structures of all sizes, with the huge central spine at one end out to the little 'capillary' struts that hold the individual hull plates (which won't weigh very much, so they won't need to be particularly strong). That kind of structure would work for that. I don't have any objection to the slight stresses from attaching plates to liftarms (every piece in this build is gonna be stressed one way or another), but I worry a bit about that limiting the amount of cross-bracing I can do since it occupies so many pin holes. I'll see how it works out.

Hi! So, as discussed in the last couple of pages of this thread over on the Star Wars subforum, I'm thinking about how to build a model of the Super Star Destroyer Executor to scale with the official UCS Imperial Star Destroyer. This model would be about 40 feet long, 12 feet wide, and 4 feet tall. I'm working on this in Stud.io, with the understanding that the odds of anyone ever trying to build the thing in real life are effectively zero, but it's important to me that it be sturdy enough that it *could* be built even though in practice it isn't going to be (I measured my garage and it actually would fit, but I think some of my family members might have problems with me spending probably upwards of a million dollars on LEGO). My plan is for it to be basically a hollow shell of panels supported by a Technic frame, and I'm hoping you guys can give me some advice with that. So basically the question is: The spine of the ship will be essentially a forty-foot-long Technic bridge supporting the cityscape on the top of the ship. It needs to be able to hold several hundred pounds without significant sagging, but that weight will be distributed across most of the length of it rather than concentrated at any single point. The main bridge beam can be supported by as many columns as necessary, but ideally not so many that they spoil the look of the ship (I'd like to have at least six feet or so between columns, and more would be nicer). The beam can be anything up to about three feet thick if necessary (in both dimensions--a solid 3x3x40 foot block of bricks is an option on the table here), but of course if it's that huge it'd be very difficult to work with. Price is effectively no object (anybody seriously considering building this won't care about a few thousand more or less dollars given the scale of the model). How would you go about building such a thing? What does an efficient girder design look like at that scale? Approximately how much weight would you trust a structure like this to carry (i.e., would I need more like 10 of those beams, or more like 100)? Are there any resources I can look at for designing this structure (short of going back to college to get an actual engineering degree)? Thanks!

I have so much work that I really ought to be doing, so if I have any sense I'll probably stop posting random things for at least a week or two, but here are some ideas for heavier turbolaser batteries based on the style of the ones from 75252 (on the left). The center is an ISD2-style octuple barbette battery, and the one on the right is a heavier turret that might correspond to some of the small rectangular greeblies on Executor's hull. On the studio model the little rectangles are just flecks of random plastic, but presumably the intention was for those to represent something too small to add any detail to rather than literally just a featureless rectangular box, so some of them might as well be guns.

I can't agree with that. The TIE Brutes from Solo are 100% consistent with the heavier TIE models from the old EU, and while the TIE Strikers and Reapers look a little silly (I would rather have seen a new non-TIE dropship model, like we finally got in Mando), they're still NOTHING compared to the TIE Crawlers, Maulers, Boats, Predators, or any of the other completely ridiculous Legends ones. There's certainly a nostalgia factor to the old ones, and I wouldn't be disappointed if they started creeping back into canon, but you can't possibly claim that they make more sense than the new Imperial or First Order fighters. :P

Oh, that's a good point, actually. TIE/lns are very very narrow relative to almost any other fighter, including everything else in the TIE series. It's totally possible that the launch tubes would be designed for them specifically and wouldn't fit most other fighters, leading to Phantoms or whatever else having to find other launch mechanisms. This would be especially likely to be true for ISD-1s, since when they were entering service the only common Imperial fighters were TIE/lns and V-wings (which are similarly very narrow), so their facilities would probably be optimized around those.

I was in the middle of editing the previous comment, but you already replied, so screw it. My understanding of the Cross-Sections's take on TIE launches is more Battlestar Galactica rather than Babylon 5. Their vision is that the TIEs land in the ship through the main hangar, are refueled and rearmed and everything, and are then moved internally into dedicated launch tubes that can spit them out all in a line much faster than they could launch individually from a hangar or even from racks, like they do with Vipers in BSG. There isn't really enough room in the roof of an ISD's hangar to launch most of its fighters from racks like that; you'd have to have some kind of complicated rail system to move the empty racks out and new fighters in place to launch, which would defeat the whole point of the rapid-launch system. You can have a couple, like FractalSponge shows, but 72 racks would take up the entire ceiling of the bay and would have to be very obvious, even when the hatches were closed. Something like the Vigil-class that only carries two squadrons or so can launch everything at once from racks, and something like Executor has so much roof space that it can do whatever the hell it wants, but an ISD is in a bit of an awkward place with 72 fighters and not that large an opening to drop them through.

Oh, no, the animation is definitely based on an ISD. I meant that in the specific mission that that video shows I'd thought they'd started in a Nebulon, but I think I had the wrong level and that that's the ISD-1 Garrett in the video.

This video has it, at around 2:00. As best as I can tell they're launching out of a Nebulon-B2 rather than an ImpStar in that specific instance, but I'll take your word for it that the game shows ISDs using those racks as well (it would shock me if they had more than the one animation sequence). It makes perfectly good sense, and like I said, that basic method is still canon with the Gozantis so it's reasonable to assume that other ships do it as well (FractalSponge's Vigil-class in Legends, for example) but I don't think anybody's followed that thread with ISDs specifically in the last couple of decades. I'm a huge fan of FractalSponge's work--I made his Vigil-class already, and my Customs Corvette is influenced by his as well--but he subscribes to an idiosyncratic and (in my opinion) slightly crazy view of canon, many of the details of which haven't been updated since 1980 or so (as you can tell from the fact that he still insists on calling them Imperators rather than Imperials...). He wants Star Wars to be a much harder military sci fi than it ever has been, and while everybody occasionally has to ignore the parts of canon that don't make any sense (like the 144 fighters thing), that community ignores a lot more canon that I personally think is reasonable. Their view is that "it would make more sense if..." trumps virtually everything else, to the degree that their picture of the SW universe often has very little in common with what's actually depicted on-screen. There's plenty of great content over there, but there's also a lot of stuff that I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole--at some point you just have to be able to accept that, like, trying to correlate reactor volumes to the specific energy yields of various weapons isn't going to make anybody happy, and trying to bend the SW universe until the numbers line up is very clearly the path to the Dark Side.

Most of those kinds of stats ultimately derive from the old West End Games RPG sourcebooks. They make sense in that context. I'm sure that whoever originally wrote that knew perfectly well that that was a tiny fraction of the fighters it would 'actually' carry, but to be useful to them it had to get cut down to something that could be fought against, and compared to the typical Star Wars RPG gameplay 144 fighters was still an enormous number. The problems only start when those numbers get copied verbatim into an Essential Guide or wherever instead of being treated as gameplay mechanics. The drop racks for TIEs are still solid canon, since that's still how they're carried by Gozantis. Do you know what the source is for ISDs launching them like that, though? The version I'm familiar with from the Incredible Cross-Sections books has the TIEs scrambling from deployment chute things out of the sides of the hangar.

https://imgur.com/a/S4DWdig Still thinking about Imperial hangars. A lot of them seem to be a sort of modular design at different scales--you can see in the various shots of people landing on the Death Stars that they tend to come in clusters of different sizes, usually with a couple of small hangars flanking a large one, so that's what I've got here. The two on the right are each 6x6 studs, and are stackable and tile-able so they can be easily dropped into the side of any wall or whatever. Those are about the size of Docking Bay 327, more or less; they hold a squadron of 12 TIE/lns (as shown there), or a Millennium Falcon-sized ship comfortably, or a Lambda very uncomfortably (my little Lambda design sadly doesn't fold up nearly as tightly as the real thing, so it does fit in there but only just barely). The one on the left is 12x12 and similarly stackable, so it meshes conveniently with the squadron hangars. That one's a good fit for several shuttles, medium freighters or gunships (Gozantis, for example), AT-AT landing barges, and so forth. Ships larger than that probably rarely enter pressurized hangars, but a ship the size of Executor would definitely have at least one or two hangars large enough to 'drydock' something like a Lancer or Carrack or a bit larger (not a Vic or ImpStar, though). That capability has never been shown in canon, as far as I know, but it's got, like, ten cubic kilometers of space in that ventral cutout, so it has to be doing something with it. Executor would have a lot of these little hangars. The official complement is 144 TIEs, but that's obviously absurd. Executor is about 170 million times larger than a TIE fighter, so even if it only devotes, say, 1% of its internal volume to hangars (which isn't very bloody much), and even if only 1% of the hangar volume actually translates to stored fighters (which is a *serious* underestimate, by probably a factor of 10), that still leaves us with something like 17,000 TIEs, and there's easily room for that many hangars on the model. They've never really been shown, but that 4x2-stud door opening is too small to be readily visible against the scale of the ship, so they're almost certainly scattered all over. Would I actually include that many in the model? I mean... it's not like that's gonna be the biggest logistical hurdle with this thing, so definitely maybe? That's only $2500 worth of nano TIEs. No big deal....

Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten I hadn't posted that in a few days. I've screwed with it a fair bit, with different engines and cargo pod and a new internal structure, so now it's held together by a 2l axle in the middle instead of the bracket-clamp method. This is at the point where I think I could probably call it done and be reasonably satisfied, but I'm still thinking about whether I can do a better job of it. The cargo pod in particular still feels like there's room for improvement. And I'd like to get the small secondary engines on the sides of the main two, but I don't think that's going to happen. Because that's only the front two thirds of the ship, from the tip to the widest point of the wings. There's another 5.5 km of ship behind it. The scale is right for the 17.6 km version (which is how it's depicted in the movie, not 8 km, 12.5 km, 19 km, or any of the other lengths that've been given in various reference books). But also, this is going to look a bit weird because we're all so used to seeing the ship depicted as far narrower than it really is. This is going to be almost 50% wider than the official LEGO set, for example, so if that's the version you're most familiar with (as is true for me and probably the majority of folks on this forum), your first impression will be that the proportions are way off, but this is what it actually looks like.

See, when you lay it out like this it hardly looks crazy at all.... And also, the dimensions happen to work out perfectly. I haven't sat down and *really* crunched out the numbers to pick an exact scale yet, but my first-pass math is that the forward point section is 12130 meters long, which works out to 1042.096 studs, and the length of 26 of those forty-stud-sections is 1042.1. I didn't even do that on purpose, that's just how long it turned out to be. Clearly the Force is speaking to me. I should probably make a new thread for this. Obviously it's an offshoot of my fleet project, but they're largely separate topics.

I don't think it's very likely likely that sets based on anything spoilery from this episode will be coming in the next wave. That isn't how they've ever operated; they're super conservative about what goes into production ahead of releases. That ship is certainly a strong candidate for a set, but there'll be a couple of months of lag time at least.

Honestly, I think the snowtrooper is one of the best figures they've ever had in a foil pack. With exactly one exception (Bespin Luke), the foil packs have always been battle pack troopers or cheap, common versions of main characters. The snowtrooper is at least one that there's a huge demand for right now as people try to fill out their AT-ATs.

I see what you're saying here, and you're not wrong, but I think the physical issues of building something at this scale make that very difficult. If you could get it assembled, it'd be great, but that requires figuring out how to lift a (minimum!) twelve-foot-long plate-built panel, and how to support the rest of the model before they're attached. And I don't know how many plates thick the lower hull would have to be to keep from buckling, but it'd be a whole bunch. With a frame made basically out of technic beams you have a lot more freedom to assemble it gradually instead of needing the whole thing to come together at once as a single unit. I totally agree with you that in theory this would probably be the best way to do it, and if we were working in sheet metal I'd be totally on board, but as it is I don't have a vision of how to make that happen in practice.

This is the crux of the issue, IMO. You can do whatever you want as long as you plan it from the beginning. Once he'd already built the main hull plates as 13-foot-long solid pieces he was hosed--retrofitting a frame into that after the fact, in the space he had available, may well have been impossible without reworking the hull so much it was essentially a different model. My plan of having the hull plates go on as a row of completely independent two-foot-square panels and having all the structure in the frame ought to make it approachable. EDIT instead of double posting: More math. As best as I can tell, the ship depicted in RotJ is about 5640 meters wide, which means that the slope of the pointy bit of the ship is about 4.3. Almost all other depictions of the ship are quite a bit narrower--the official LEGO version is a bit of an extreme example, with a slope of 6, but they're nearly all narrower than the movie to some degree. My inclination might be to compromise a tiny bit: specifically by about 3.7%. If I can tolerate a slope of 4.44, I can build the whole hull off the 9-40-41 Pythagorean triple, which would dramatically simplify my life. That narrows the ship by about 200 meters, or 5 inches at this scale, which a) I really don't think would be noticeable even if you were specifically trying to measure it and b) is consistent with other canonical images of the Executor-class.

I mean, this is very much not a trivial problem. We definitely need to be talking about crush concerns and stability, LMAO. In some sense, that guy's problem was that his model's too small. One the size of the official UCS SSD will basically stick together on its own without a specific support frame; and one the size of mine has multiple feet of clearance between the upper and lower hulls, so there's all the room in the world for basically however much frame you decide you want; but at 13 feet long, his is in an awkward middle zone where it's plenty big enough to crumple in on itself but it also presumably only has a couple inches of room between the bottom of the cityscape and whatever structure he has connecting the lower hull, which isn't a lot of room for reinforcements. The square-cube law actually plays at least a bit to our advantage here--the model is basically hollow, so its weight increases roughly with the square of length, but the internal volume available for support structures increases with the cube. The strength of a support is dependent on its cross-section, but the tensile strength of a LEGO is sufficiently greater than the forces we're playing with here that that won't be a significant factor.

That's a fascinating thread. One hell of a build, to be sure. There are a lot of naysayers in there telling the guy that it won't be possible, and in that instance I tend to think that they're probably right--if you start by building a solid outer shell and don't design around a frame from the outset then you'll be fighting a seriously uphill battle to ever make it actually buildable. And he's done some stuff that makes it harder than it needs to be, too; tiling the outer hull increases the weight and part count enormously. But, in my opinion at least, if you start with building a sturdy support structure and then layer the ship as panels around it there shouldn't be any real limit on what you can make. The actual crush weight of a 2x4 brick is around 950 pounds; the model would certainly weigh more than that, but if the weight is sensibly distributed across columns with a total cross-section of several thousands of studs you shouldn't be anywhere near the literal physical limits of what LEGO can do. From a structural perspective, the requirements here honestly aren't insane. Here's a LEGO bridge with a 16-meter unsupported span; the most I'd be talking about is two or three meters, and they went with a minimalist suspension bridge design, whereas I'd have room in the body of this thing to hide a beam literally three feet thick if I needed to. I think the combined weight of the entire outer hull would be under 400 pounds, and that's distributed over more than 400 square feet of surface area. The cityscape would weigh more, but that's centered directly over the columns and central beam. There's no doubt in my mind that there exists a support structure that would work for this, but my problem is that I don't know how I'd know when I've hit it, or if I'm grossly overengineering something to the point that it's far heavier than it needs to be. Now, am I actually going to build this thing? Realistically, no way in hell. My guess is that this would represent probably north of $500,000 worth of bricks, or something in that ballpark. My budget for crazy projects is probably bigger than most peoples', but not that much bigger, unless I win a lottery or something. It could be built in my garage, but it wouldn't fit out through the doors, and even if it could be made to break down efficiently for transport I don't know that that would really buy me much. It would be too big to display at a convention or something, and it would take too long to set it up and break it down to be practical for any event. The only place this thing could really exist would be in a dedicated display space at, say, LEGOLand, or a museum built for it, or something (I guess if we're talking about building a half-million-dollar model, I probably buy a basketball court or something just for it...). So for practical purposes, this would purely a digital art piece. Which is fine with me, in fact; it's very important to me that it be buildable, but not nearly as important that I actually build it, in the same sense that a theoretical mathematician might care deeply about proving that a problem has a solution but not at all about what that solution is. I test-build all the models I publish to make sure they'll stick together, but I only have a handful of them actually assembled and on display. And honestly, am I even going to finish it digitally? Probably not that either. There's this guy who says he's my "boss" and I "have to work" or I'll be "fired", so unfortunately my ability to devote myself to this kind of project is limited. And that's even before the technical issues with Stud.io. Just playing around to satisfy my own curiosity, I've gotten up past 600,000 pieces in one Stud.io file (128 copies of the UCS ISD), and it hasn't crashed yet (so the situation has definitely improved since 2014, and the 71k pieces in that guy's Executor would be no problem now), but the program is basically nonfunctional at this point (it gives me the spinny death wheel every time I move the cursor), and that's still half as many pieces as I estimate this would take (and that's probably an underestimate). So really, this is probably better thought of as a mathematical exercise than something that will result in a publishable MOC. But, for the record, it is something that I'm thinking very seriously about.

So Executor would be something like 39.7 feet (12.10 m) long, 12.9 feet (3.95 m) wide, and 4.6 feet (1.42 m) tall (presumably at the command tower, so the bulk of the ship would be a few inches shorter). Obviously the mode would be as hollow as possible. The engines and the cityscape on top would both weigh a lot, but I would do the smooth parts of the hull in panels of 5x5 16x16 plates (80x80 studs, or about 2x2 feet, which I think is sturdy enough even at only two plates thick). How much support would you estimate such a thing would need? A sane person would build this off a steel frame, but that would be cheating. I want the midline of the ship to sit close to eye height—say, five feet off the ground. My instinct is that a 20x20-stud column of technic bricks, oriented vertically (ie, studs pointing sideways), could support an enormous amount of weight, but I don’t know how much horizontal distance a beam like that could cover without noticeable sagging. It would take about 1250 1x16 technic bricks to build such a column, and I’d probably need at least, say, ten columns. Probably another 15k 1x16 bricks for the main spine of the ship, and likely at least that many again for smaller struts supporting the individual panels… Has anybody here ever tried building anything really large like this? (I seriously doubt that we have anybody here who’s built anything *this* large, but large enough that the mechanical strength of individual parts is a serious concern?) I would rate my general engineering sense as ‘fair’, but I don’t know how to accurately estimate all of the forces on this thing. Ah, not a LEGO Sandcrawler unfortunately, but a real one (I mean, for a given sense of ‘real’, I guess, but you know what I mean). The full details, including the build log, are available here: http://greatjawahorde.com/ I’m doxxing myself here, but I already post these MOCs on Facebook under my real name, so whatever. Although it’s not LEGO, the Sandcrawler does at least demonstrate that I’m no stranger to pretty serious Star Wars building projects…

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.