Kdapt-Preacher

#193-197: GAR land vehicles! Including the AT-TE, AT-AP, AT-OT, SPHA-T, and LAAT/i. If you can tell which is which, I think I'll have done pretty well given the scale. These are largely the same vehicles I showed in this thread a while ago, with the SPHA-T reworked slightly. I wanted to do something slightly different this time by including some terrain instead of just a black stand; I thought that worked out quite well with the land vehicles in my first small vehicles pack, and this seemed like a good opportunity to expand on that and have a bit more of a proper scene here. Being able to display multiple vehicles in context with each other is the whole point of this project, after all. I'm open to the idea of including buildings or locations built to this scale, too--I think that would be interesting to have next to the ships. I started a model of an Imperial prefabricated garrison base a while back; I should finish that at some point. And I also have the 3D model of the Scarif tower used in SW:BF2, which I think would make a nice-looking LEGO build, although that turns out to be like 1300 meters tall, so it would be a little impractical as a desktop model... Unrelated to that, the current official word is that an SPHA-T is 140 meters long, but that's immediately obviously incompatible with Attack of the Clones; they're nowhere near that big in the movie. The scale reference in Complete Locations puts it in the range of 40-45 meters long, much closer to what's actually shown on screen, so that's what this is scaled to.

The MC40's not so big--only 600 meters long, the same size as the Neutron Star. But granted that's still a significant project. I'll want to finish the Dreadnaught and Gladiator, at least, before working on either of them. Probably other oddballs, too, like the Battle Dragon or a Ton Falk. But I really ought to get in the habit of finishing the stuff I have in progress before starting new models, anyway... See, I don't like the Nebulon-B either, though! I made one because it's one of the most iconic ships in the series, but ick. Rebel scum. I'll take my nice Imperial murder triangles any day of the week. I'm well familiar with the EU version of the Dreadnaught, but I honestly might like the Canon version better? It looks more Imperial. I know the EU version looks like that because it was designed for the Republic, but still. Anyway, the EU appearance is actually also canon again, so right now we have the best of both worlds (or the worst of both worlds, if you're unhappy about having two totally different-looking versions of the same ship, but that's not exactly uncommon with EU stuff). The real benefit of getting the Legends version together, though, is that then I could make Outbound Flight, which would be a really nice display piece.

Ugh, the Dreadnaught. Yes, I'm still working on it, but I haven't made a whole lot of progress in like a year. I haven't come up with a clean solution to all the awkward angles around the back, and every time I open that .io file I get an overwhelming urge to work on literally anything else, LMAO. I have a decent build for the head and engines but basically nothing in the middle yet. What I probably ought to do is drop the Canon version for now and work on the Legends design instead, which I think is an easier shape to achieve despite all its curves. Sigh. It'll happen, but it's not going to be the next large ship I finish. The Neutron Star is on my radar, but it's just such an unbelievably ugly ship, LMAO. There's a serious lack of Rebel capital ships, so I'll probably get to it eventually, but I'd prioritize Mon Cala stuff over it. I should do an MC40 some time...

#191 and 192, CR-20 and CR25 troop carriers! I started that CR-20 model ages ago but really wanted the top ingot piece in red. LEGO has now released that piece, so here it is! No, I don't know why 'CR-20' has a hyphen and 'CR25' doesn't, so don't ask me.

That's an interesting suggestion. I hadn't made the connection, but it definitely does look like somebody tried to build an Eagle out of Lambda parts. That's also just a pretty simple design for a ship that's supposed to pick up large containers, so it could be a coincidence, but it certainly could be intentional. I have no idea.

#187-190, more small Imperial ships! I don't know whether you guys get tired of small Imperial ships, but I sure don't. This set includes the PB-950 patrol boat, the Curich-class shuttle, the Far*Reach IV PQR, and the builder shuttle from Force Commander. We're kinda scraping the bottom of the Expanded Universe barrel here, but as far as I'm concerned as long as there still is a barrel we haven't scraped enough yet. I also just published an update to the previous small Imperial ships pack to correct the aforementioned bracket problem, which impacted the IPV-1 in that set as well; the new version of the model is externally identical.

Thanks! It's very important to me that they all be buildable. I don't really care whether anybody actually does build them (including myself; I test-build them, in whatever random colored parts I have laying around, but I don't have remotely enough parts to actually keep all of these assembled, or even to build many of them in the right colors the first time), but it does matter that somebody could. That's the big problem with Executor, really; I have complete confidence that I could make something that would look good, but it's too big to test-build, even in sections, and I don't know how to convince myself that I'm engineering it adequately otherwise. Almost exclusively LBG, but there are a handful of pieces in LG because they don't exist in LBG. I strongly prefer to use pieces that're currently in production whenever possible, but occasionally there's a good enough reason not to if there's no other piece that'll accomplish the same thing. Let's see, off the top of my head I think the four 1x5 technic plates in the Cantwell's nose, the round 1x1s with fins that I used for the 'waist' of the two grey CR90s, and the 1x2 hinge plate in the mandibles of the YT-1000 are the only ones, but there might be another one or two somewhere. Not very many, though. I do approve of the idea of mixing LG and LBG to get a more weathered look on the freighters and whatnot, and I would encourage anyone who likes that style to go for it, but I haven't done it in these Stud.io files.

So here's something incredibly annoying. I had these models of the Curich-class shuttle and IV QR that I was pretty happy with, and I went to build them, and it turns out they don't work; you can't build the noses like that. They should work, but do not. The ends of those brackets are 1x1 studs, so you'd think you could connect them together like that, but for God knows what reason the end of that piece is exactly 1x1 studs, without the normal 0.1mm horizontal tolerance that lets two pieces actually sit next to each other, with the result being that two brackets don't like to sit face-to-face on a plate like that. In retrospect, I've actually run into this problem before (in the Cantwell, and maybe the Imperialis too), but this is the first model where it's become obvious that that was what was wrong with it. A bunch of the 1x1 brackets in my collection are slightly worn and will make this connection without protest, but new ones pop off. For these two models I can easily fix it by switching one of those to an inverted bracket and an inverted slope, which results in an identical model, but I'm going to have to do more work on the Cantwell. I was already planning to do that anyway, since I've been meaning to re-engineer how the upper hull panels there are attached to incorporate lessons learned from the Immobilizer, but I'd thought I'd wait and see what the new Cantwell in Andor looks like before screwing with it; but if that's an actually illegal connection and not just annoying to build that timetable may need to move up.

Y'all should all come to Dragon Con. Stackpole is even more accessible than Zahn, since he does a ton of stuff with the Writing and Sci-Fi Lit tracks as well as Star Wars. We only had the one SW Authors panel, but (according to the schedule at least) Stackpole ran or spoke at at least 13 other panels and writing workshops for various tracks this weekend. You can meet these people too, as long as you can get to Atlanta over Labor Day weekend. On that note, Dragon Con is now over, which means my workload is abruptly much lower and I can hopefully finally get more stuff done here. Right now I have, if I've counted correctly, ten new models and two major modifications to old models finished digitally that I have to physically test-build and then make instructions for, so my plan is to knock those out first and then move on to more new stuff, including hopefully larger stuff. In terms of large ships (over ~300 meters), I have partial models of an AA-9 Coruscant freighter, a Battle Dragon, a Hammerhead, a Dreadnaught, a Gladiator, a New Republic Correctional Transport, a Venator, and a Yuuzhan Vong yorik-stronha, plus modification to turn 75252 into an ISD2 and more accurate ISD1. The yorik-stronha and NRCT are the most complete of those and will probably be finished first, although as usual my schedule is determined primarily by my happening to wake up with a good idea for how to design some specific bit rather than by actively deciding to work on something, so things will happen when they happen.

You should come to DragonCon some time. That kind of thing can be arranged. All the authors are very knowledgeable about what they've written. The problems start when you start asking about things they didn't put in the books, LMAO. But he certainly immediately got what I was talking about and had a coherent answer to it, even though he didn't have a ballpark length off the top of his head.

I’m a volunteer for the Star Wars track at DragonCon. One of the upsides of that is that, one weekend per year, I can basically just walk up to most of the SW authors and ask them random questions. :) This year we had Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, Delilah S. Dawson, Michael Stackpole, Claudia Grey, Greg Keyes, and John Jackson Miller, but nearly all of the prominent ones have come at least once.

I did talk to Tim Zahn about it today, and he says he has no idea how big it is. He says that when he's writing he categorizes ships by 'tier' so he has a sense of relative power levels and what should match up with what, but he doesn't translate that to size in any way that would be useful to us unless he has a specific reason to. But he also said that on reflection he wasn't certain he hadn't already done that, since it did interact with Imperial ships in one of the novels, and that he would look at his notes and get back to me if he found it written down somewhere. So, maybe?

OK, here's my announcement: I am delighted to report that, courtesy of the excellent ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk, there are now custom UCS stickers available for several of my models! I think these plaques look great, if I do say so myself (I say that as if I had anything to do with them---ultimatecollectorstickers did 100% of the work of making the plaques; all I contributed was the Stud.io file of the models). I've always been a little bit torn about UCS plaques, honestly, since I do like the cleanness of a minimalist stand that lets the model stand on its own (so to speak), but now that I've seen these with the plaques I definitely think it kicks them up a notch. Instructions for the updated versions of the stands are now available on those models' Rebrickable pages (the non-plaque versions are still available as well), and the stickers are all available from ultimatecollectorstickers.co.uk for £2.25 apiece. To be clear, in case this is important to anyone, I'm still not making any money off of this, as I prefer to keep my MOC building strictly as a hobby; I'm not involved in the sale of the stickers at all other than having made the original MOCs, and the payment goes wholly to ultimatecollectorstickers to cover having them physically printed. But I'd definitely rather support ultimatecollectorstickers than those guys in China who are illegally selling knockoff kits of my models, so I'm glad that at least some of the potential money to be made here will go to somebody I like. :) EDIT: Also, eagle-eyed viewers may notice that the Class Four Container Transport now has screen-accurate colored cargo containers, since while I was doing this I realized that those ingot pieces have been introduced in dark orange and sand blue in the time since I originally designed the model! The instructions for that model are very complicated and involve multiple rounds of rendering, so I haven't posted that update yet anywhere other than in this one render, but it'll go up after DragonCon.

Those Sourcebooks are great and they've got some really nice early illustrations of a lot of Imperial stuff, including a shot of the rare two-well Interdictor variant that mostly stopped showing up after about 1995, but unfortunately there's nothing in them about Chiss ships. There's basically nothing about the Chiss themselves in the original Thrawn trilogy at all; they didn't get into Thrawn's backstory until later. Even in the Hand of Thrawn duology they didn't even get into Chiss space until Vision. You see a lot more of the Chiss in Outbound Flight, but nothing in the EU ever went into remotely as much detail as the recent Ascendancy trilogy. That's the first time we've ever had any real insight into what life in the Ascendancy or the larger CEDF looks like outside of just Thrawn's forces and their few appearances in Dark Nest and the like.

I thought we should move this out of MandalorianKnight's thread, since it doesn't have anything to do with his model, but for everybody else this is a continuation of a conversation about establishing the scale of the Springhawk that started here. Zahn did introduce the ship itself, back in the old EU when Lucasfilm gave the authors had a lot more freedom to play around with anything set well outside the movie era. The Springhawk specifically first appeared as Thrawn's flagship in Outbound Flight in 2006, but the general idea that the Chiss have a government and therefore presumably a navy of some sort is at least a couple years older than that, and in some sense it might even predate the EU itself, depending on how much of Thrawn's backstory Zahn already had in mind when he was writing Heir to the Empire in 1991. But Chiss ships just happened never to appear in any illustrated media before that one Thrawn comic in 2018; they were always only covered in novels, and they weren't figured prominently enough to make it into any of the Essential Guides to Vehicles or similar sources that illustrated some of the other EU stuff of that era. I'd also be curious to hear where the comic illustrator got that specific shape, though, since Zahn tends not to provide very detailed descriptions of technical stuff like that (which is probably a sensible policy generally, I guess). It's completely possible that the illustrator just made up something that would be consistent with the description given in the book, but it also wouldn't surprise me if at some point in the last twenty years Zahn himself had made a back-of-a-napkin sketch of his vision of a Chiss ship for the benefit of another author or something, since they appeared in the NJO collaborative project and they'd have wanted to keep the descriptions consistent. I have no idea. He's doing a Star Wars panel at DragonCon on Saturday, so I'll ask him about it if I get a chance. Last DragonCon I moderated a panel with him about the Chiss government, which would've been the perfect opportunity to talk about it, but alas, that was a year ago, and we're not doing anything that specific this year. But I'll see what I can do.

Yeah, that comic the best source we currently have. It's the Steadfast, not the Springhawk, but same thing for these purposes. That panel is immensely useful because it's the only current visual depiction of the ship, so the model would be based essentially entirely on that image, but unfortunately the shuttle is much closer to the 'camera' than the cruiser is, so it doesn't really give a sense of scale. I'm actually going to be talking to Timothy Zahn this weekend, though, so if I get an opportunity I'll ask him directly.

I have looked and looked to see if I could figure out how big the Springhawk is supposed to be...

Nice! That's an appropriately obscure one--I always love seeing the old-school EU ships getting some attention. You're right that I haven't made one, but were I to do so it would look something like this. I've been vaguely thinking for a while about how to fill out another set of small freighters that I half-completed months ago, so I appreciate the suggestion!

You've already seen the announcement on Discord, so you have no right to be confused. But it'll be a couple days until they're finalized and ready to actually announce.

I appreciate both the kind words and the threats. Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. I actually have multiple models that I've finished and haven't posted yet, but I'm desperately trying to get ready in time for DragonCon next week (oh god, it's next week) and probably won't be able to do much with them until maybe the second week of September. However I do expect to have a fun announcement in a couple of days (not Executor).

So for background here, I'm into a lot of sci fi and really really like the whole idea of scale ships, enough so that I had this image printed as a poster for the wall of my college dorm room. I'm not a fan of all of the series represented there, but I would say that I'm into enough of them that certainly more than half the ships on that chart would be at least potentially fair game. If I had infinite time and LEGOs, after I finished Star Wars to my satisfaction I would probably run through something like Mass Effect, Halo, Star Trek, BSG, X3, Warhammer 40K, Babylon 5, and Stargate in that order, and then I'd see how I was feeling from there, plus various miscellaneous things (like, just yesterday I was looking up how big Subnautica's Aurora is). But I'm way more into Star Wars than I am into any of those other series, and giving that I unfortunately do not have unlimited time it's extremely unlikely that I'm ever going to feel like I've made all the ships I want to in that line. It's not out of the question that I'll branch into something else at some point (if I ever think of a good-looking way to make the Destiny Ascension...), but I have no plans to do so any time soon. As you guys may have noticed, I'm something of a completionist; I'm not joking when I say that if I made one Star Trek ship I would feel compelled to make all of them, and given that I've already crossed that bridge with Star Wars I think I have about as much as I can handle for the moment, LMAO.

The Borg cube is over 3km on a side. That's more than two meters at this scale, almost twice as long as the ISD. It would be a structurally simple build, in some sense, but not something you could easily keep in your house. Not as crazy as Executor, but not exactly a 'just', either, LMAO.

I'll admit that I have on occasion thought about building some non-Star Wars ships. I'm not as big a fan of Star Trek as I am of Star Wars, but "not as big a fan" is relative here; I have seen every episode, and the Romulan D'deridex-class is one of my favorite ships in all of sci fi. But I just know that if I ever made any of them I'd be committed, and then it's a short step to thinking "Hey, the Pillar of Autumn would look really good next to these", and suddenly I'm on a very dark road, LMAO. Safer to stick to Star Wars and not go down that rabbit hole. Plus, Federation ships are all curvy and hard to build.

BrickLink and BrickOwl both work like EBay, in that they're marketplaces that connect individual sellers and buyers rather than single stores. The average prices are typically going to be similar for both of them, but with the caveat that a) there are often very large differences in price for the same part between individual sellers and b) for something like this where you're only buying a few dozen parts, it's very likely that the price of shipping is going to cost at least as much as the bricks themselves, so the seller's location may matter more than just what they're charging. Both websites have a 'wanted list' feature that lets you import/export a list of parts and a 'buy all' feature that'll do a good job of finding the cheapest store or stores to order from, so you can play around with both by exporting your parts list from BrickOwl and importing it into BrickLink and see which one will do better. BrickLink is usually the go-to for most of the community because a) it's just bigger and has more sellers, which usually gives you better odds of getting a good deal and b), it's owned directly by LEGO themselves and is (debatably) more tightly controlled; but for any individual order there might happen to be a seller on BrickOwl that has the exact combination of parts you need for cheaper than you can get them on BrickLink, or vice versa, so poke around and see what works best for you.

Yeah, 75252 isn't perfect, but it's quite good. Especially given that you can get it for a fraction of what any of those other models would cost. Most of the community seems to prefer things to be as studless as possible, but I've never really agreed with that; the style used for 75252 is much closer to my personal preference. The only changes I want to make to it are things like adding the additional brim armor that ISD1s have, replacing the couple of flat silver pieces with LBG, working on a few places where it would benefit from pieces that've been introduced since it was released (like the new 2x6 wedge plates), and so forth.