New version of the turret variant is slowly getting there. For the more perceptive ones of you, do you recognize the turrets?

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The amazing Icesword (check out 'Miniatures of the North') has painted up a copy of one of my escorts, check it out!

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One major problem I'm kinda running into with this ship is its castability due to the side guns. Might have to rethink the design a bit.

The launch bays in the middle of the hull (both left and right sides) look a bit odd, will probably remove them and try to make the middle of the ship a bit thinner. That way the front and back of the vessel will be a bit more accentuated.

I also noticed that the details in the front guns have more or less disappeared. Will have to enlarge them a bit.

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I tweaked the design a bit, mainly to improve castability:

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Work on the cruisers is slightly delayed. I was working on starting from scrap again, but I ended up hating it as a cruiser sized ship, so I shrunk it, turning it into an escort.

It's still an early WIP, especially the engine part needs work.

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Pleasing shape. I like where this is headed!

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Not sure yet about the weapons...

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Ok, hung around the SketchUp forum, toyed a bit with cleaning up the model and before I knew it I basically remade the entire model, and not only that...I learnt how to get the thing watertight on SketchUp itself, no longer having to use stuff like Netfabb. Victory is mine!





A few small changes:
-Beefed up the backpart of the ship a bit, making it a tiny bit wider.
-Removed the wing mounted weapons. I never liked them, would have to come up with something else though...

Time for detailing...

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Update time! Been starting on the detailing. At the moment the model stands at 42mm long:

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I fixed the first escort to improve its castability:




Also continued working on the blockade runner:

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Cool stuff

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By the way, here are the two ships next to one another:

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These are looking really good. Painted print came out well.

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Ok, I started playing with 'ordnance' again. This time a troop carrier shuttle. Well, not a troop carrier per se, but I imagined the Legion would use them in this role. They could be used to move troops between ships, but are primarily used to transport troops to the surface.




The model is about 6.5mm long, 2.8mm tall, and 4.8mm wide.

Here is the shuttle model next to the Blockade Runner:

Note that the scales of the actual models vary. I imagine the blockade runner to be 1:25000. The 40mm long model would in 'real life' be little over 1km. The shuttle model, being 6.5mm long is supposed to be little over 30m long in 'real life', making the scale about 1:5000. This explains why the shuttle model seems so big next to the blockade runner, but it's also the only way to have such a model.

Here are the two craft were we to use 'actual scaling':

In this case you'd probably need a magnifying glass and some tweezers to play the game since the shuttle would be about 1.25mm.

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The troop carrier shuttle is finished. Also designed a base for it:



The base's diameter is 20mm. The poles have varying lengths, their bottom diameter is 4mm and the top part is 1mm. The longest pole is 17.5mm, which made me think of the following. The ships are 'flying' pretty low compared to normal flight stands. However, in order to keep this thing castable in a 1 inch mold, the poles can't be too long if I want the entire base to remain a single piece. But isn't it then perhaps easier to mold the base in multiple parts, so the base itself and the poles? That way I can also make longer poles and such. Players could then put together their own base.

Not sure if this would become too fiddly and/or inefficient for production. I can imagine that casting the base as a single piece could mean a higher chance of miscasts and of course more "wear 'n tear" for the mold itself. Oh well, food for thought...

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