Kdapt-Preacher

Great question! The short answer is that there are several UCS ISD MOCs that would work well, so you have options. The target length for an ISD at this scale is 110 cm long, which is what 75252 is, but realistically you've got a fair bit of wiggle room there just because of how small most of my models are; even if you change the nominal scale by 10 or 15% most of them will still be within a stud of the correct length relative to the ISD. Onecase's Monarch and mortesv's Avenger are both in that range. Raskolnikov's Aggressor is a little bit smaller, but you probably wouldn't be able to notice without actually going over everything with a tape measure. I'm sure there are other options as well, but those are the three that I know off the top of my head. I've actually been planning to publish some modifications to 75252 myself. I'd like to have both a slightly more accurate ISD1 and a full rebuild as an ISD2. But I do quite like the style of 75252, so that's going to be an upgrade package rather than a new build, keeping the structure and general aesthetics while mostly just shuffling surface details around to match the studio models better. I'm not going to be, for example, replacing all the plates with tiles or anything drastic like that, so if you don't like 75252 my versions probably won't be any better.

The set is supposedly based on BF2, so it's most likely to be this guy, although of course LEGO has been known to make unpredictable choices.

I think we have to count the Endor Action Battle thing from 2019 as an actual set. It's not quite your typical system-scale thing, but it's much closer to that than it is to the 4+ stuff, and it has a proper speeder bike, Ewok tree, etc. But that doesn't change the basic point that Endor has been seriously underrepresented relative to Hoth, Tatooine, and Kashyyyk in particular for the last decade or so.

They're just gone for that render since it's landed. I decided I like the effect too; it's not something I'd use all the time but it works well here. I still haven't physically built this model yet, so nothing's 100% final yet anyway though.

It's been, like, a month! The 4+ AT-ST is still brand new! Surely that's just the Endor set you've been waiting for...

And here are the deployable legs that let the model can land the way it does in TCW. Unfortunately they don't really retract into the hull, but the model does include an internal compartment to store them when it's displayed on the stand. I think this model is probably finished now, but I'll have to test-build it IRL to make sure of that before I do anything else with it. This disc shape has also been a good test run for the Hapan Battle Dragon I've been working on, which is basically the same thing at a slightly larger scale. I have a better idea now of what that'll end up looking like.

WIP of Hondo Ohnaka's Acushnet, which is probably going to be the next large model I post. This is WIP because there's still work to do on the internal structure, but I think this is about what the exterior is going to look like (I may change some plates to tiles or similar, but this is approximately it). It'll probably end up having slightly more pieces than the Quasar Fire and Immobilizer, but it's not nearly as complex as they are structurally. I haven't made up my mind about the Flarestars yet. I kinda like the idea of having smaller ships physically attached to the larger model, especially since that's consistent with how 75252 does it, but I feel like I'm never quite sold on how they look in practice. I might post the model with the Flarestars on separate stands rather than with the transparent antennae. Another thing to ruminate on...

Ack, sorry, I said that backwards. The one on the left is the original and the one on the right is the new version. Unfortunately I don't see any way to get the best of both worlds in the space I have here. The whole bottom of the ship is only two plates thick, with the floor of the hangars and the bottom hull layer mutually supporting each other. If their studs are facing in opposite directions there'd have to be two more layers in the middle, I think. At least I don't know of any way around that. I'll continue ruminating on this for a couple of days, and build it physically to see how it holds up. I think this is probably a net positive change, since a) the exterior of the ship has to be more important that the insides of the hangars and b) I think the improvement to the exterior is greater than the worsening of the interior, so odds are that this'll get published next week, but we'll see.

\ The positioning makes it a bit hard to see, especially since Stud.io's renderer really hates illuminating interior areas. The goal was to show off the differences in the hangars. The new one on the left isn't as smooth inside; it's got holes in the center two bays, and a divot in the very center on each side of the panel divider. Thank you.

OK, looking for opinions here. I'm poking at a major update to the Quasar Fire to flip the entire bottom of the ship so it doesn't have antistuds showing. I strongly dislike having large sections of exposed antistuds, and especially on a ship like the QF where the bottom is actually in focus since the hangars are such an important feature. The current model mostly is the way it is because it was the first large model I ever designed and I didn't know how to do it better then, but I do now. So the concept I'm playing with has the exact same dimensions as the current version, and is externally almost identical on all surfaces except that the whole bottom of the ship is now studs-out, which I think is a major improvement overall. But there are multiple downsides: 1. The interiors of the hangars don't look nearly as good. The floors are now composed of inverted tiles rather than regular tiles, so they're still smooth and black as they should be, but the 1x3 inverted tile has an unsightly hole in the middle of it. And the various small hangar accessories that I had before, the TIE gantries and such, are much less convenient now that they don't have studs to sit on. 2. The build is significantly more complex, and uses somewhat rarer pieces. Nothing terribly unusual, but the black tiles and 6x10 plates it used before were things that a lot of folks would already have on hand, whereas the inverted tiles aren't as common. 3. The stand is going to be uglier, since it isn't going to just be a stud-antistud connection. It'll have to have another inversion in there. Which, granted, plenty of my models already have. 4. It may be slightly less structurally sound? I'm away from my parts collection, so I can't test-build it for a few days. I think it'll be fine, but complexity breeds flexibility, as they say... This is what we're looking at (old on the left, new on the right): So my question is, does this seem like a good trade to you? On one hand presumably most people will spend most of their time looking at the outside of the model, so that should probably be the priority, but on the other hand the interactivity of having 'functional' hangars here is important to me, and I feel like that's a strong selling point of the model. Is this a big enough improvement to the exterior to be worth compromising that a little bit? Do you not care at all about the hangars, or not care at all about the antistuds in the first place, or have another opinion?

I’m not BrickDoctor, but I believe that’s this piece: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=752#T=C

A World Devastator is high on my list of stuff to build, since I think that model would look really good, but it's a serious project and I haven't started it yet. The nice thing about them is that since they upgrade themselves there's no set size or specific design, so I have a ton of freedom to do what I want with it. My current thought is to aim at a scale of 800-900 meters or something in that range (i.e., ~50cm long), big enough to be nice and detailed but not ridiculously impractical or expensive to actually build. That would be a midsized Devastator, I think, bigger than the common ones shown in Rogue Squadron but much smaller than Silencer-7 (which would be over two meters long at this scale). My plan is to finish my Venator and Victory before I start that model, but I haven't historically been very good at working on things in the order I intended to, so who knows. The Darksaber is harder. Its only officially published length is "several kilometers", but the (admittedly very dubiously scaled) artwork seems to imply that its radius is at least a kilometer or so, which would put the length at more like ten or fifteen kilometers, so probably something like ten meters long at this scale, which is definitely not happening. Now, granted, it's probably smaller than Executor and I am working on that, but Executor might have a little more popular appeal...

OK, take two here. #184-186, even more small Imperial ships! Sun Crusher, the Imperial Customs Frigate, and the IPV-1 System Patrol Vehicle. This is probably going to be the last set of small Imperial ships, as I think I've now made essentially all of them that are large enough to render at this scale and small enough to post as a group, which is why this set only has three ships and why it includes the IPV-1, which is a bit larger than the size range for these little things. If I've forgotten about an Imperial ship under, say, 100m long that you still particularly want to see, tell me and I'll see what I can do about adding it to this pack!

OK, the actual #183, the Imperialis! The Imperialis was a Cosinga-class heavy corvette fitted out as a private super-yacht for Emperor Palpatine himself. Although it was filled with luxurious furnishings and accommodations, Palpatine primarily used it as a mobile treasure vault for Sith artifacts. Imperialis was destroyed shortly after the Battle of Yavin after being stolen by Lando Calrissian, but the Emperor kept identical copies in other facilities and they continued to see use throughout the Galactic Civil War. To be completely honest, I think this is kind of an ugly ship. I like the dark blue, but the red accents don't do anything for me. But I do like the contrast between this and the typical grey Imperial ships; the curves on this one feel more like a callback to Palpatine's Naboo roots, especially with the class presumably being named after Palpatine's father.

Meh. You guys are right that I could probably get it hosted if I screwed with the model a bit or just pushed the issue with their admins, but it's not like it's a particularly big deal. It'll go up sooner or later, and it's not like you can't see how to make it as it is. And I don't disagree with Rebrickable's stance that they want to have some minimum level of effort to host a MOC. They have a legitimate interest in preventing their platform from being spammed. Honestly, although it's a little elitist of me to say, if anything I think they could probably stand to be a little more stringent about that. The Sun Crusher is justifiable in the sense that it's clearly a legitimate model in the context of this collection and it has a specific reason to be the way it is, but I don't begrudge them rejecting it on those grounds.

Rebrickable has rejected the Sun Crusher for being "too small". This is outrageous. It's unfair! How can it be a superweapon and not be large enough to justify a third piece? But it's also wholly in keeping with my earlier anecdote about the Sun Crusher being entirely banned from discussion on at least one forum. I suppose I'll hang onto this and post it whenever I next do a small Imperial ships set.

The Sun Crusher! The infamous Sun Crusher has to be one of the most controversial ships in all of Star Wars. Conceived as an indestructible star-destroying Imperial superweapon, its primary purpose is actually to start online flame wars between starship nerds, to such a degree that on one forum I used to frequent any mention of the ship would get you an immediate 24-hour ban. I have spent the last ten months designing this magnificently detailed model to finally give the ship the UCS treatment it deserves. After my Sheathipede set people said I could go no lower, but once again I have proven them wrong! This model won't be visible immediately since Rebrickable requires manual admin approval of MOCs under 20 pieces, so you'll have to wait a day or so to see the step-by-step instructions for this incredibly intricate model. I do also have an actual model to post tomorrow when the renders finish. EDIT: I originally called this model #183, but since I can't actually publish it yet, it'll get a new number later.

Ach, y'all youngsters here who don't know your LSW history! The very first battle pack ever, in 2007, was 7654 Droids Battle Pack, which had four B1s and three SBDs.

You can attach the flipper to the head with the LotR Ring piece (11010). That has the advantage that it would vaguely look like the tiara thing Tiplar wears--the ring piece is gold rather than silver, but close enough. That requires turning the flipper upside down, though, so I'm not sure how it'll end up looking. I know this doesn't help you since you can't order anything, but this is the best option I can think of for a purist headpiece: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?id=38305#T=C. It's not perfect, but it's yellow, the shape is pretty good, and it costs less than a dollar, so if you ever get the opportunity to snag one that's what I would go with.

I never actually leave. I just sometimes have actual work to do (in this case I was doing fieldwork for a month). Can't build LEGOs all the time, unfortunately... I sure did! I'm very excited for it. I loved Rogue One and this show looks like it's going to have a ton of great Imperial content. Just from that shot in the trailer I can already tell I'm going to have to update the Cantwell model (which doesn't surprise me at all given how bad most of the references are--this is the first ever clear shot of the underside of the ship). My preliminary list is that the visible bottom side of the front flange is flat rather than ridged, which probably means it has a rectangular rather than hexagonal cross-section; there's a large turret mounted on the ventral midline; and there's an additional small antenna or other instrument mounted on the portside top of the command tower. It's so far in the background in Solo that it's impossible to say whether these changes are consistent with that depiction (and that could've been an artistic rendering in-universe, anyway), but this is definitely a slightly different version of the ship than the one in Starships and Speeders, so I'll probably keep both versions up. These are all pretty easy changes to make to the model, but we'll have to see whether there are more shots in the actual show--I'd love to get a clearer look at the engine array.

So this is roughly what Executor's dorsal hull plates ought to look like (although with the caveat that the proportions here will look slightly off since the panels are laying flat rather than angled as they are on the ship). The two panels are each 1626 studs long and have about 2630 pieces (just for one plate layer). I did a lot more math than seems like strictly ought to have been necessary to translate the Battlefront model into a flat panel with appropriate proportions, and apparently I did part of it wrong since the sections here are actually still about three studs wider than they ought to be, but this gives you a feel for the scale and the approximate shape. The way I had been thinking about doing this, with 80x80 panels, turns out not to really make sense given that a) the hull is big but not *that* big and b) I want the greebly lines to be in plane with the axis of flight, as they are on the actual ship. That ends up actually simplifying things a lot, I think, since it reduces the amount of support structure that has to be aligned with the sides of the ship rather than the midline. I'm still going to be working in Excel and Meshmixer for a while, but I feel like I have a coherent plan for this.

I love the little Acclamator. If only we could get a larger one...

I can't wait to see the Razor Crest. 6187 pieces is plenty to really go all out. And you can't argue with that price-per-piece ratio, either--$530 is way less than you'd spend on BrickLink to get a comparable model.

I've been out of town for several weeks and haven't had access to a computer to do anything, but great work has been done in my absence! First, Stud.io has updated to include the new part 80796, so I can finally publish #182, the X70-B Phantom-class prototype that I showed off here months ago. That means that my TOR player ship collection is finally complete! Second, someone has finally responded to the note that I put in the instructions of my Quasar Fire model more than a year ago soliciting suggestions for a better attachment mechanism for the engines. User vquillate over on Rebrickable came up with a perfect solution to to the problem, so I've just updated the QF to include that improvement as well. And it uses a piece that didn't exist when I originally designed the model, so I don't even feel bad about not having thought of it myself at the time. Thanks, Vquill!

Oh, very nice! I've been out of town for weeks and haven't been following things, so it's cool to come back and see how well this has come along. It looks great! As for how to publish it, if you're planning to make it available for free Rebrickable is probably the easiest option. You have numerous options, of course, up to and including making your own site to host it (the scale of the model would justify that, especially since you have the Otana in the works as well--that's the start of a serious collection), but given that you already have digital instructions for it just throwing it up Rebrickable would be the simple way to go.