[MOC] KdaptPreacher's 1:1455 Fleet --- 208 ships and counting (New: Onyx Cinder)

[Kdapt-Preacher]

3 hours ago, Agent Kallus said:

Great work as always 

If you want any more suggestions, how about Echo's transport ship from the new bad batch episode, I wookiepedia'd it to get its name that's the only name it gave me. Or how about Gorain Shard's ship? Both quite new ones but I just thought they should be on your radar 

I already have a tentative model for Echo's transport, but I'm hoping to get a clearer view of it in this week's episode. I think I can extrapolate the scale pretty well from comparing it to the Gozanti last week, but I'd like to see a good profile view of it. If we don't get that I'll go ahead with the model I've got, though. Gorain Shard's ship looks great, but we need a lot more information than just the brief glimpse we got--hopefully that turns up again and we can figure out how big it's supposed to be.

 

#202, the Hardcell-class interstellar transport! A briefly featured but memorable ship from Attack of the Clones. They never showed up in TCW, so they haven't attracted much attention in more recent media, but they're featured in a number of video games (albeit mostly as stationary targets). This model also includes a stand so you can display the ship in horizontal 'flight' mode, but if you prefer to display it in the vertical landing posture its legs will support it fine without needing a separate stand.

[Kage Goomba]

very nice.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

I am making progress on Executor. I'm still not sure I've placed any bricks that will actually end up in the final model, but I have what I think is a relatively solid plan for how everything is going to go together. The more I work on it the more reasonable everything seems, which does kind of worry me a little bit, but I think it'll work out.

Most of what I've been doing still isn't very visual, but here's my back-of-the-napkin sketch for what the engine cylinders might look like, to give a sense of the scale. I had kind of been picturing these as giant contraptions that would need a ton of internal framing (I've been working on a Lucrehulk-class core ship recently and had that sort of UCS Death Star-sized thing in my head), but they're really not ridiculously large at all. I think 16 segments is enough, here; I'd want to bump up to 32 to get a smoother circle if they were any larger, but at this scale that wouldn't buy me much, and doing them with simple hinge plates like this is far sturdier.

[Agent Kallus]

On 3/27/2023 at 7:31 PM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

#202, the Hardcell-class interstellar transport! A briefly featured but memorable ship from Attack of the Clones. They never showed up in TCW, so they haven't attracted much attention in more recent media, but they're featured in a number of video games (albeit mostly as stationary targets). This model also includes a stand so you can display the ship in horizontal 'flight' mode, but if you prefer to display it in the vertical landing posture its legs will support it fine without needing a separate stand.

Great work, I always forget that this a ship and not a building as we only really see it sit there, but it looks spot on.

 

[Kage Goomba]

21 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I am making progress on Executor. I'm still not sure I've placed any bricks that will actually end up in the final model, but I have what I think is a relatively solid plan for how everything is going to go together. The more I work on it the more reasonable everything seems, which does kind of worry me a little bit, but I think it'll work out.

Most of what I've been doing still isn't very visual, but here's my back-of-the-napkin sketch for what the engine cylinders might look like, to give a sense of the scale. I had kind of been picturing these as giant contraptions that would need a ton of internal framing (I've been working on a Lucrehulk-class core ship recently and had that sort of UCS Death Star-sized thing in my head), but they're really not ridiculously large at all. I think 16 segments is enough, here; I'd want to bump up to 32 to get a smoother circle if they were any larger, but at this scale that wouldn't buy me much, and doing them with simple hinge plates like this is far sturdier.

Well the engines are of various sizes - these look good - texturing on the lower right one is very nice honestly.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

30 minutes ago, Kage Goomba said:

Well the engines are of various sizes - these look good - texturing on the lower right one is very nice honestly.

Specifically, they're of those three sizes. ;) Or at least the outermost nozzle parts are. The cylinder widths vary over the length of the engine, but these are good enough to let me roughly block out where they'll need to go on the model. The total lengths of the engines will end up being around 80 studs. The texture's going to change a lot since there's some greebling and whatnot on the outside of the engines as well, but this is the basic idea. I still need to think about how I'm going to do the flames in the engine--it'll be hard to make that look natural, I think. We'll have to see. That level of detail is easier to sort out once the structure's in place.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

This is the basic idea of what I'm looking at for Executor's hull struts. Details may still change slightly, but this is approximately what it's going to look like. I've test-built one of these spars already and it's quite a sturdy structure.

The layout will be something roughly like this. In this image the spars are positioned 41 studs apart, but I think that's probably overkill given how light the hull panels are. I'll likely remove at least a couple of them, at least in places where the hull panels are overlapping three or more. The flat hull plates are divided into individual sections, currently 128 studs square, although I may lower that to 80 studs or thereabouts since I think the 128-stud ones may be a little too large to easily manage during assembly. The idea here is that the whole thing should break down into sections so it could be transported (although you'd still probably need a truck; this isn't gonna go in a car, or even probably a van). The grey struts in that image that form the base of the brim trench break down into 82-stud-long sections, and each of the diagonal spars will separate from them and fold up so they could be tossed in a box. I'm not saying it would be practical (at all), or that you could assemble this quickly (I suspect assembly would take days, and certainly require multiple people), but in theory I think it would be possible to take it to a convention or something. This whole thing is built around a series of Pythagorean triangles, so all those diagonal beams are in-click with each other and can be connected directly to the central structural elements, which will be oriented parallel with the direction of flight.

Current plan is for the total build to be about six feet tall, so the bridge tower is at or just above eye level for an average adult. That puts the brim trench at about four feet off the ground, and the bottommost tip of the ventral armor about two feet off the ground. You might have to crouch down to get a good look at the hangars and stuff on the underside, but I think it would look silly if it was any higher than that (and you wouldn't be able to see the dorsal cortex without standing on something).

Edited March 31, 2023 by Kdapt-Preacher

[Kage Goomba]

13 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

This is the basic idea of what I'm looking at for Executor's hull struts. Details may still change slightly, but this is approximately what it's going to look like. I've test-built one of these spars already and it's quite a sturdy structure.

The layout will be something roughly like this. In this image the spars are positioned 41 studs apart, but I think that's probably overkill given how light the hull panels are. I'll likely remove at least a couple of them, at least in places where the hull panels are overlapping three or more. The flat hull plates are divided into individual sections, currently 128 studs square, although I may lower that to 80 studs or thereabouts since I think the 128-stud ones may be a little too large to easily manage during assembly. The idea here is that the whole thing should break down into sections so it could be transported (although you'd still probably need a truck; this isn't gonna go in a car, or even probably a van). The grey struts in that image that form the base of the brim trench break down into 82-stud-long sections, and each of the diagonal spars will separate from them and fold up so they could be tossed in a box. I'm not saying it would be practical (at all), or that you could assemble this quickly (I suspect assembly would take days, and certainly require multiple people), but in theory I think it would be possible to take it to a convention or something. This whole thing is built around a series of Pythagorean triangles, so all those diagonal beams are in-click with each other and can be connected directly to the central structural elements, which will be oriented parallel with the direction of flight.

Current plan is for the total build to be about six feet tall, so the bridge tower is at or just above eye level for an average adult. That puts the brim trench at about four feet off the ground, and the bottommost tip of the ventral armor about two feet off the ground. You might have to crouch down to get a good look at the hangars and stuff on the underside, but I think it would look silly if it was any higher than that (and you wouldn't be able to see the dorsal cortex without standing on something).

*drowns in drool*

[Kdapt-Preacher]

I'm still alternating structural stuff for Executor with thinking about greebling and smaller details. These are a couple more concepts for what some of its weapons might look like. I showed off the three in the back a while ago; the back left is LEGO's version of an ISD1 turret from 75252; the back center is my design for an ISD2 octuple-barrel turret; and the back right is a vague idea for a heavier turret of approximately that size. No obvious turrets are visible on the Executor studio model, so there's no direct reference other than extrapolating from what other Imperial Navy turrets tend to look like. In the front row, the smallest gun is intended to match the shapes of some of the greeblies on the edges of the hull panels on the studio model; there might be a couple hundred of those along the length of the ship. That also happens to be pretty close to the size of the main turrets on a Victory, so I may use that or a very similar design when I eventually get that ship finished. The two next to it are slightly larger than an ISD's turrets, and could possibly correspond to some of the squarish lumps scattered across Executor's surface, but more probably would be situated around the cortical regions. Finally, the big turret would be part of the super-heavy anti-capital battery that Executor supposedly has but never seems to actually use. Those barrels are each about the size of the big spinal cannons on a Munificent-class frigate. A gun of this size definitely ought to be visible on the studio model, so it's hard to say exactly where these things should go on the ship, but my tendency would be to nestle them down in the cortical regions where they'll blend in with all the random antennae and spars and stuff. From a tactical perspective it doesn't make any sense to put your guns down there, obviously, but the model is what it is; there's nowhere to hide the kind of weapons Executor is supposed to have on the surface of the ship.

[Kage Goomba]

11 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I'm still alternating structural stuff for Executor with thinking about greebling and smaller details. These are a couple more concepts for what some of its weapons might look like. I showed off the three in the back a while ago; the back left is LEGO's version of an ISD1 turret from 75252; the back center is my design for an ISD2 octuple-barrel turret; and the back right is a vague idea for a heavier turret of approximately that size. No obvious turrets are visible on the Executor studio model, so there's no direct reference other than extrapolating from what other Imperial Navy turrets tend to look like. In the front row, the smallest gun is intended to match the shapes of some of the greeblies on the edges of the hull panels on the studio model; there might be a couple hundred of those along the length of the ship. That also happens to be pretty close to the size of the main turrets on a Victory, so I may use that or a very similar design when I eventually get that ship finished. The two next to it are slightly larger than an ISD's turrets, and could possibly correspond to some of the squarish lumps scattered across Executor's surface, but more probably would be situated around the cortical regions. Finally, the big turret would be part of the super-heavy anti-capital battery that Executor supposedly has but never seems to actually use. Those barrels are each about the size of the big spinal cannons on a Munificent-class frigate. A gun of this size definitely ought to be visible on the studio model, so it's hard to say exactly where these things should go on the ship, but my tendency would be to nestle them down in the cortical regions where they'll blend in with all the random antennae and spars and stuff. From a tactical perspective it doesn't make any sense to put your guns down there, obviously, but the model is what it is; there's nowhere to hide the kind of weapons Executor is supposed to have on the surface of the ship.

Yeah that's a tough one..... not any references out there other than "guesses" in terms of gun emplacements.

[rocka5438]

Hey, if you're building this to scale with 75252, does that meant it will also scale to this similar-sized MOC?
(https://www.brickvault.toys/collections/space-wars/products/imperial-star-destroyer)

[Kdapt-Preacher]

2 hours ago, rocka5438 said:

Hey, if you're building this to scale with 75252, does that meant it will also scale to this similar-sized MOC?
(https://www.brickvault.toys/collections/space-wars/products/imperial-star-destroyer)

Yes, or near enough as to make no difference. That model is only about 6% larger than 75252, so most of the smaller ships will still be within a stud of the right length, and even the ones that aren’t will be close enough that nobody’d notice the difference without personally measuring them.

[YourLocalB2]

Hey, big fan of your MOC’s. Just wondering if you think the UCS Venator will be to scale with the SSD so that your models are scaled to it.

Also, could you tell me any other people who create Mocs like this in the 1:1455 scale?

Edited April 9, 2023 by YourLocalB2

[Kdapt-Preacher]

15 hours ago, YourLocalB2 said:

Hey, big fan of your MOC’s. Just wondering if you think the UCS Venator will be to scale with the SSD so that your models are scaled to it.

Also, could you tell me any other people who create Mocs like this in the 1:1455 scale?

I’m pretty confident that the Venator will be scaled larger than the ISD is. That’s only a guess, of course, since I don’t have any more information than anyone else at this point, but that’s the way the math leans. A Venator is a much smaller ship than an ISD—roughly 70% as long, but proportionately much narrower and far less bulky in the stern, so probably less than a quarter of the total volume. The number of parts in a model doesn’t scale directly with the volume, and we also have to take into account that a Venator has a more complex shape and a larger area of greebling, but I would expect an official Venator at that scale to have substantially fewer pieces than the ISD does, probably in the range of two or three thousand. The Jorstad Designs model has about 4000 parts, and MOCs are almost always denser than official sets. The upcoming UCS model has 5400 parts, so it should be a fair bit larger than that. My guess is that it’ll land close to the same length as the UCS ISD or only slightly shorter, with the extra parts going to the more complex engines and whatnot.

For other MOCs, the Jordstad Designs that I mentioned in the last paragraph has several large capital ships, including a Venator and some Mon Cala ships: https://www.jorstad-designs.com/

Ky-E Bricks on Rebrickable has a lot mixed in with all the Star Trek, although several of them are non-canon names/sizes for things: https://rebrickable.com/users/ky-e bricks/mocs/

The ‘nano-scale’ stuff on BrickVault is technically scaled to 1:1666 to match the original UCS ISD, but for small ships that’s functionally equivalent to 1:1455: https://www.brickvault.toys/products/nano-scale-fleet-nebulon-b-arquitens-gozanti-cr90-gr75-tie-fighters-more

There are a ton of other one-off ones on Rebrickable, too. DaringSteel over there has made a couple of ships from The Expanse at this scale, specifically to fit with my collection; RobertBrick has a Raider that was one of the inspirations for me to start this project (although I confess that I think my Raider is better—he didn’t have that 6x2 wedge piece to work with, which is really the part that makes the model); DarthDesigner has stuff at a bunch of scales, but off-hand I think their Sphyrna is about this size; etc. I don’t know of any great way to search for those models, unfortunately, but if you poke around a bit you’ll run across them. Many are labeled 1:1500 or 1:1666 rather than 1:1455, but for most of those ships that makes for less than a stud of difference.

Edited April 9, 2023 by Kdapt-Preacher

[rocka5438]

Don't suppose you also have good reccomendations for some 1.1455 MCs (MC75, MC80) or are those something coming down the line?

[Kdapt-Preacher]

4 hours ago, rocka5438 said:

Don't suppose you also have good reccomendations for some 1.1455 MCs (MC75, MC80) or are those something coming down the line?

Jorstad Designs has excellent models of both of those, including both the Home One and Liberty MC80 variants. There’s a link to his site in the post above yours, and he’s also on this forum, so you can probably find his threads if you poke around a bit. I do want to make those myself as well eventually (especially the MC75, since that’s the only one I’m missing from the Battle of Scarif), but they’re way down on my list of capital ships, so I don’t expect to get to them any time soon. 

[Kdapt-Preacher]

WIP Strike cruiser, to prove I'm not dead. So, the deal is, I've moved to Australia and am now some 9,000 miles away from my LEGO collection, so I won't be able to physically test-build anything until probably early 2025. That was an important part of my design process here, and I haven't decided yet how I'm going to deal with not having access to it. It doesn't really matter with very small models, since for the most part if a build only has ten parts you can pretty much just look at it and see that it'll stick together, but even then there can be issues occasionally (like how the 1x1 brackets in one of my Small Imperial Ships groups didn't quite fit the way the measurements suggested they ought to), and I definitely don't think I could publish something like the Venator I've been working on without having verified it. I think the easiest thing to do is probably to just only post renders of stuff and delay posting instructions until I've built them myself, but that'll be a long time to wait. I might go ahead and make instructions for things I'm reasonably confident of and just post them with a note that they haven't been verified yet; I think I can get away with that since I'm distributing everything for free (obviously it wouldn't fly for paid instructions), but I kinda hate to do that because then inevitably some little thing will end up needing to be changed and it's a whole pain to redo all the pictures and everything (not that I haven't done that on plenty of occasions in the past, but I'd prefer not to do it for *every* model). And also because, y'know, I have standards and would prefer to be associated with finished products. It may also be the case that I get a bunch of models to the 'mostly finished' stage but then run into stuff that I really need to look at IRL to know how to continue the digital model, which I won't be able to do much with in the interrim. So I dunno; we'll see what happens. I'm also going to be busy with actual work, so my LEGO building time would probably decrease from what it has been the last couple of years anyway, but I do want to be clear that that doesn't mean I've given up on all the ambitious plans I've talked about over the last 14 pages of this thread! I will still be working on stuff, even if I may not be able to effectively publish it.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

Strike-class medium cruiser! Provisionally finished, with the aforementioned note that I haven't been able to build anything in person here. This isn't a super complex build, so I'm reasonably confident in it even without having built it, but there's a big gap between 'reasonably' and 'completely'. I think it's at least fair to say that this is what the exterior is going to look like, even if the structural bits end up getting reworked slightly when I eventually test it.

More renders in the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[Mandalorianknight]

Very nice! Always hard to make more curved or circular shapes, and this is a very good likeness of the strike cruiser.

[Kage Goomba]

Totally loving this.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

Next up, the MC30c frigate! At long last, a Mon Calamari ship. These things have been kind of intimidating me for a long time, so it feels good to have one finished, even if it's just a small one. This also fills a much-needed gap for a mid-sized Rebel ship to counterbalance all the Imperial stuff. Like with the Strike cruiser, I'm pretty satisfied that this is finished but I can't currently build it IRL, so I'm going to hold off on publishing instructions for the moment.

More renders in the spoiler:

Spoiler

 

[Kage Goomba]

Huh....where'd these first make an appearance? Very interesting.

[Kdapt-Preacher]

5 hours ago, Kage Goomba said:

Huh....where'd these first make an appearance? Very interesting.

Looks like the first appearance was in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, but most people would probably know them from Empire at War. They've been around the EU for a long time, and they're back in current canon as well, although they haven't been featured very prominently anywhere yet. The design is based on concept art from RotJ, so there are a couple other similar-looking things around, too, most notably including the New Republic cruisers in the recent Ahsoka trailer. Those probably aren't MC30s but they sure look like them, at least from the front end.

[Kage Goomba]

18 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Looks like the first appearance was in Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II, but most people would probably know them from Empire at War. They've been around the EU for a long time, and they're back in current canon as well, although they haven't been featured very prominently anywhere yet. The design is based on concept art from RotJ, so there are a couple other similar-looking things around, too, most notably including the New Republic cruisers in the recent Ahsoka trailer. Those probably aren't MC30s but they sure look like them, at least from the front end.

That DOES ring a bell now - thanks. :)

[SeanRicho]

On 7/31/2023 at 1:39 PM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I've moved to Australia

Welcome to the land down under!