Tweaked the design of the station a bit. It still needs some work to get the silhouette ready, then it's details.

One major challenge in the design is to keep the price of it rather normal. First test (hollowed out) left it at €160 for the cheapest material at Shapeways, which makes no sense. Meaning I've had to resize it a bit (as seen in the current pic).

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Considering the castability of my models, I never even considered this for my original Legion ship, assuming if it could be printed, it could be cast, not considering all the undercuts.

So now I have this awesome ship design, but it might be a challenge to cast easily. Which means it's tweaking time! Since the first print I've slightly updated the design, and now this process will continue. Undercuts and such will be removed, whilst maintaining the model's original aesthetic. Let the challenge begin!

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You should read this site if you're looking for harder sci fi space combat:

http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarintro.php

Thanks a lot for that link!

I've been pondering a bit about the roles of ordnance, more on that later on, but probably not here since that would be off topic, we've been discussing space war over here a lot as well, join in if you;re interested.

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In the meantime I made a scale picture of the Legion ships I've got so far:


And yes, that little fellow is the latest addition to the Legion family...

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Ok...here a more detailed shot of the escort!



It's almost finished. Still need to tweak the prow a little bit and add some final details, then it's time for a Frosted Ultra Detail test print.

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Legion battlegroup (will come up with a more corporate, less war sounding title)



As you can see the escort is finished (for now), which means I'll be making some test prints at Shapeways in the coming days.

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Look what Malika just ordered to test print...



Special thanks to Armand for helping me out with the stl file.

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Cool stuff!

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Look what arrived at my doorstep...





First of all, apologies for the bad quality photos. I'm not that great a photographer, and I should perhaps have the models primed/painted to do them true just since this see-through stuff makes the lighting very annoying.

I must say that the quality of the FUD print isn't as bad as I expected! I really thought it was going to be a lot worse. However, this doesn't mean that it's suitable for casting, there are still visible print lines and there are some tiny inaccuracies in the prints here and there (which weren't on the model).

Looking at the model I'm quite happy how it turned out, some of the smallest details on the ship are around 0.15mm and even they are pretty visible. I wonder how they would look lie with a layer of paint...

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Lovely model!

In my personal experience, 99% of the time the print lines will disappear between the priming and the painting, but maybe that's because I'm somewhat of a "heavy" painter!

I'd love to see that painted

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Yeah I don't consider Shapeways suitable for casting. But it's quite appropriate for gaming. I have some epic scale TIE fighters in FUD and they look fantastic. Easily better than resin or metal, close but not quite equal to plastic.

And with that said, many plastics lines don't make full use of the detail they can get from plastic, so FUD is a reasonable alternative even to that. You lose on price but can get small-batch models that would be totally nonviable otherwise.

You don't happen to have a link to those epic scale star wars models now, do you?

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X-wing is 1/270 scale, which is a very good match for Epic. When you're on shapeways, simply search for 270 and you'll see the major providers.

Hmm, maybe I should design some 'non-Star Wars' stuff as well...

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