*watches with keen interest*

Those 5-piece AT-ATs are adorable. Might be the smallest model I've seen of one!

  On 1/25/2022 at 2:37 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Stud.io is having a bit of a rough time with it. There seems to be a limit on view distance. I've just blocked out the dimensions (only 1600 studs long, nothing crazy...) and it's not wanting to render the whole thing at once. I haven't tried to seriously estimate how many pieces the whole model would be (order of magnitude, maybe a million?), but it has trouble just loading the UCS ISD, so this may need to wait until I get a better computer. Plus, the garage is big enough but there's currently a sixteen-foot sandcrawler in it, and I don't have anywhere else to put that at the moment. Have to see. I'm thinking about it...

That I believe, whether it's Stud.io, your computer, or a combination of both, I imagine working with that digitally is going to be a challenge in and of itself. I'll be very interested to see you make the attempt though, if you decide to. 

Also, is there a thread, or a gallery, or an article, something about that Sandcrawler? I'd really like to check that out.

So Executor would be something like 39.7 feet (12.10 m) long, 12.9 feet (3.95 m) wide, and 4.6 feet (1.42 m) tall (presumably at the command tower, so the bulk of the ship would be a few inches shorter). Obviously the mode would be as hollow as possible. The engines and the cityscape on top would both weigh a lot, but I would do the smooth parts of the hull in panels of 5x5 16x16 plates (80x80 studs, or about 2x2 feet, which I think is sturdy enough even at only two plates thick). How much support would you estimate such a thing would need? A sane person would build this off a steel frame, but that would be cheating. I want the midline of the ship to sit close to eye height—say, five feet off the ground. My instinct is that a 20x20-stud column of technic bricks, oriented vertically (ie, studs pointing sideways), could support an enormous amount of weight, but I don’t know how much horizontal distance a beam like that could cover without noticeable sagging. It would take about 1250 1x16 technic bricks to build such a column, and I’d probably need at least, say, ten columns. Probably another 15k 1x16 bricks for the main spine of the ship, and likely at least that many again for smaller struts supporting the individual panels… Has anybody here ever tried building anything really large like this? (I seriously doubt that we have anybody here who’s built anything *this* large, but large enough that the mechanical strength of individual parts is a serious concern?) I would rate my general engineering sense as ‘fair’, but I don’t know how to accurately estimate all of the forces on this thing. 

  On 1/25/2022 at 5:29 PM, Geihlen said:

Also, is there a thread, or a gallery, or an article, something about that Sandcrawler? I'd really like to check that out.

Ah, not a LEGO Sandcrawler unfortunately, but a real one (I mean, for a given sense of ‘real’, I guess, but you know what I mean). The full details, including the build log, are available here: http://greatjawahorde.com/ I’m doxxing myself here, but I already post these MOCs on Facebook under my real name, so whatever. Although it’s not LEGO, the Sandcrawler does at least demonstrate that I’m no stranger to pretty serious Star Wars building projects…

Edited January 25, 20223 yr by Kdapt-Preacher

I would have no idea what kind of support such a build would need. I would agree that 20x20 seems like a good place to start at least. That said, based on the stuff you've posted here, you are regularly building things and using techniques that are well beyond what I could come up with. My latest build is pretty rudimentary by comparison to something like your Cantwell. I say that as a way of saying that I would trust your estimation far more than I'd trust mine. Doing it in all Lego sounds pretty awesome though and my gut says it could be done, challenging (and part heavy) as it may be.

And that Sandcrawler is super neat! I had no idea there was a Jawa chapter, so to speak, of the 501st. In a lot of ways, the fact that it's something that can be driven makes it even more serious than a Lego version which just has to sit there. It seems like you could tackle this Executor build. Like you said, it's a serious project, but you aren't a stranger to them.

  On 1/25/2022 at 5:42 PM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

So Executor would be something like 39.7 feet (12.10 m) long, 12.9 feet (3.95 m) wide, and 4.6 feet (1.42 m) tall (presumably at the command tower, so the bulk of the ship would be a few inches shorter). Obviously the mode would be as hollow as possible. The engines and the cityscape on top would both weigh a lot, but I would do the smooth parts of the hull in panels of 5x5 16x16 plates (80x80 studs, or about 2x2 feet, which I think is sturdy enough even at only two plates thick). How much support would you estimate such a thing would need? A sane person would build this off a steel frame, but that would be cheating. I want the midline of the ship to sit close to eye height—say, five feet off the ground. My instinct is that a 20x20-stud column of technic bricks, oriented vertically (ie, studs pointing sideways), could support an enormous amount of weight, but I don’t know how much horizontal distance a beam like that could cover without noticeable sagging. It would take about 1250 1x16 technic bricks to build such a column, and I’d probably need at least, say, ten columns. Probably another 15k 1x16 bricks for the main spine of the ship, and likely at least that many again for smaller struts supporting the individual panels… Has anybody here ever tried building anything really large like this? (I seriously doubt that we have anybody here who’s built anything *this* large, but large enough that the mechanical strength of individual parts is a serious concern?) I would rate my general engineering sense as ‘fair’, but I don’t know how to accurately estimate all of the forces on this thing. 

Ah, not a LEGO Sandcrawler unfortunately, but a real one (I mean, for a given sense of ‘real’, I guess, but you know what I mean). The full details, including the build log, are available here: http://greatjawahorde.com/ I’m doxxing myself here, but I already post these MOCs on Facebook under my real name, so whatever. Although it’s not LEGO, the Sandcrawler does at least demonstrate that I’m no stranger to pretty serious Star Wars building projects…

So your choosing the Executor? At that scale - you've gone totally insane lol.

I do in fact remember something about that.

There was an LDD (sp?) build - but it was too large that it was in 2 separate files.

Not able to find that one - but I found this one.

 

13 feet long - 71,000 pieces..... if your going to keep to scale with Star Destroyer - ambition isn't the word for this. o.o

 

EDIT - looks that this is the one....how damn.....this thing is epic.

Edited January 25, 20223 yr by Kage Goomba

  On 1/25/2022 at 10:50 PM, Kage Goomba said:

13 feet long - 71,000 pieces..... if your going to keep to scale with Star Destroyer - ambition isn't the word for this. o.o

That's a fascinating thread. One hell of a build, to be sure. There are a lot of naysayers in there telling the guy that it won't be possible, and in that instance I tend to think that they're probably right--if you start by building a solid outer shell and don't design around a frame from the outset then you'll be fighting a seriously uphill battle to ever make it actually buildable. And he's done some stuff that makes it harder than it needs to be, too; tiling the outer hull increases the weight and part count enormously. But, in my opinion at least, if you start with building a sturdy support structure and then layer the ship as panels around it there shouldn't be any real limit on what you can make. The actual crush weight of a 2x4 brick is around 950 pounds; the model would certainly weigh more than that, but if the weight is sensibly distributed across columns with a total cross-section of several thousands of studs you shouldn't be anywhere near the literal physical limits of what LEGO can do. From a structural perspective, the requirements here honestly aren't insane. Here's a LEGO bridge with a 16-meter unsupported span; the most I'd be talking about is two or three meters, and they went with a minimalist suspension bridge design, whereas I'd have room in the body of this thing to hide a beam literally three feet thick if I needed to. I think the combined weight of the entire outer hull would be under 400 pounds, and that's distributed over more than 400 square feet of surface area. The cityscape would weigh more, but that's centered directly over the columns and central beam. There's no doubt in my mind that there exists a support structure that would work for this, but my problem is that I don't know how I'd know when I've hit it, or if I'm grossly overengineering something to the point that it's far heavier than it needs to be.

Now, am I actually going to build this thing? Realistically, no way in hell. My guess is that this would represent probably north of $500,000 worth of bricks, or something in that ballpark. My budget for crazy projects is probably bigger than most peoples', but not that much bigger, unless I win a lottery or something. It could be built in my garage, but it wouldn't fit out through the doors, and even if it could be made to break down efficiently for transport I don't know that that would really buy me much. It would be too big to display at a convention or something, and it would take too long to set it up and break it down to be practical for any event. The only place this thing could really exist would be in a dedicated display space at, say, LEGOLand, or a museum built for it, or something (I guess if we're talking about building a half-million-dollar model, I probably buy a basketball court or something just for it...). So for practical purposes, this would purely a digital art piece. Which is fine with me, in fact; it's very important to me that it be buildable, but not nearly as important that I actually build it, in the same sense that a theoretical mathematician might care deeply about proving that a problem has a solution but not at all about what that solution is. I test-build all the models I publish to make sure they'll stick together, but I only have a handful of them actually assembled and on display.
And honestly, am I even going to finish it digitally? Probably not that either. There's this guy who says he's my "boss" and I "have to work" or I'll be "fired", so unfortunately my ability to devote myself to this kind of project is limited. And that's even before the technical issues with Stud.io. Just playing around to satisfy my own curiosity, I've gotten up past 600,000 pieces in one Stud.io file (128 copies of the UCS ISD), and it hasn't crashed yet (so the situation has definitely improved since 2014, and the 71k pieces in that guy's Executor would be no problem now), but the program is basically nonfunctional at this point (it gives me the spinny death wheel every time I move the cursor), and that's still half as many pieces as I estimate this would take (and that's probably an underestimate). So really, this is probably better thought of as a mathematical exercise than something that will result in a publishable MOC. But, for the record, it is something that I'm thinking very seriously about.

  On 1/26/2022 at 2:30 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

<snip>

The naysayers talking about crush concerns/stability - i ignore those.

 

1: its 2022 - we got better bricks since then.

2: As you saw in my MOC.....internal frame is everything....outer body while challenging....won't do much good without framework...

 

I recently moved my ISD due to LED repairs - pain in the megablocks - Lego didn't want anyone to move this thing....very frustrating when bits fall off...its why I approach my Otana thinking about that.

Nothing really is impossible - its just a matter of stubbornness and will power.

 

you could prob pull it off - but the cost is a concern for sure.

  On 1/26/2022 at 2:34 AM, Kage Goomba said:

The naysayers talking about crush concerns/stability - i ignore those.

I mean, this is very much not a trivial problem. We definitely need to be talking about crush concerns and stability, LMAO. In some sense, that guy's problem was that his model's too small. One the size of the official UCS SSD will basically stick together on its own without a specific support frame; and one the size of mine has multiple feet of clearance between the upper and lower hulls, so there's all the room in the world for basically however much frame you decide you want; but at 13 feet long, his is in an awkward middle zone where it's plenty big enough to crumple in on itself but it also presumably only has a couple inches of room between the bottom of the cityscape and whatever structure he has connecting the lower hull, which isn't a lot of room for reinforcements. The square-cube law actually plays at least a bit to our advantage here--the model is basically hollow, so its weight increases roughly with the square of length, but the internal volume available for support structures increases with the cube. The strength of a support is dependent on its cross-section, but the tensile strength of a LEGO is sufficiently greater than the forces we're playing with here that that won't be a significant factor.

  On 1/26/2022 at 3:18 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I mean, this is very much not a trivial problem. We definitely need to be talking about crush concerns and stability, LMAO. In some sense, that guy's problem was that his model's too small. One the size of the official UCS SSD will basically stick together on its own without a specific support frame; and one the size of mine has multiple feet of clearance between the upper and lower hulls, so there's all the room in the world for basically however much frame you decide you want; but at 13 feet long, his is in an awkward middle zone where it's plenty big enough to crumple in on itself but it also presumably only has a couple inches of room between the bottom of the cityscape and whatever structure he has connecting the lower hull, which isn't a lot of room for reinforcements. The square-cube law actually plays at least a bit to our advantage here--the model is basically hollow, so its weight increases roughly with the square of length, but the internal volume available for support structures increases with the cube. The strength of a support is dependent on its cross-section, but the tensile strength of a LEGO is sufficiently greater than the forces we're playing with here that that won't be a significant factor.

Call me ignorant or "noobish" - but I think it can be done - its just a matter of technique. Double up triple up quad up on technic struts - overabundance of linkers.

Course he did confess that he only did the overall hull and not really much on the inside - so yeah your going to need a steel frame for that or something. At least that's what I remember seeing in the thread initially. (nothing negative - its a monster for sure)

It's why my Otana is heavily thick and over-engineered on the frame for that reason - wantted it to be stable and not some hollow <crunch crack break> start destroyer situation like Lego's UCS model.

 

Need more bone and less meat :P

  On 1/26/2022 at 3:38 AM, Kage Goomba said:

Course he did confess that he only did the overall hull and not really much on the inside - so yeah your going to need a steel frame for that or something. At least that's what I remember seeing in the thread initially. (nothing negative - its a monster for sure)

This is the crux of the issue, IMO. You can do whatever you want as long as you plan it from the beginning. Once he'd already built the main hull plates as 13-foot-long solid pieces he was hosed--retrofitting a frame into that after the fact, in the space he had available, may well have been impossible without reworking the hull so much it was essentially a different model. My plan of having the hull plates go on as a row of completely independent two-foot-square panels and having all the structure in the frame ought to make it approachable.

 

 

EDIT instead of double posting: More math. As best as I can tell, the ship depicted in RotJ is about 5640 meters wide, which means that the slope of the pointy bit of the ship is about 4.3. Almost all other depictions of the ship are quite a bit narrower--the official LEGO version is a bit of an extreme example, with a slope of 6, but they're nearly all narrower than the movie to some degree. My inclination might be to compromise a tiny bit: specifically by about 3.7%. If I can tolerate a slope of 4.44, I can build the whole hull off the 9-40-41 Pythagorean triple, which would dramatically simplify my life. That narrows the ship by about 200 meters, or 5 inches at this scale, which a) I really don't think would be noticeable even if you were specifically trying to measure it and b) is consistent with other canonical images of the Executor-class.

Edited January 26, 20223 yr by Kdapt-Preacher

  On 1/26/2022 at 3:46 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

This is the crux of the issue, IMO. You can do whatever you want as long as you plan it from the beginning. Once he'd already built the main hull plates as 13-foot-long solid pieces he was hosed--retrofitting a frame into that after the fact, in the space he had available, may well have been impossible without reworking the hull so much it was essentially a different model. My plan of having the hull plates go on as a row of completely independent two-foot-square panels and having all the structure in the frame ought to make it approachable.

If you are pretty darn good at trigonometry, you could make the hull panels contribute a significant amount to the structure of the model. They are the furthest points from the centerline, so they would have the greatest impact / amount of plastic, much stronger than an internal technic frame could ever be. There are a couple of sacrifices that would have to be made however, such as the hull must be plate - built and have the wedge plates on the outside rather than down the centerline, but at that scale it probable wouldn't matter much anyway. This would turn a huge amount of dead weight into a weird shaped I beam that could make this somewhat buildable!

  On 1/26/2022 at 4:28 AM, ForgedInLego said:

If you are pretty darn good at trigonometry, you could make the hull panels contribute a significant amount to the structure of the model. They are the furthest points from the centerline, so they would have the greatest impact / amount of plastic, much stronger than an internal technic frame could ever be. There are a couple of sacrifices that would have to be made however, such as the hull must be plate - built and have the wedge plates on the outside rather than down the centerline, but at that scale it probable wouldn't matter much anyway. This would turn a huge amount of dead weight into a weird shaped I beam that could make this somewhat buildable!

I see what you're saying here, and you're not wrong, but I think the physical issues of building something at this scale make that very difficult. If you could get it assembled, it'd be great, but that requires figuring out how to lift a (minimum!) twelve-foot-long plate-built panel, and how to support the rest of the model before they're attached. And I don't know how many plates thick the lower hull would have to be to keep from buckling, but it'd be a whole bunch. With a frame made basically out of technic beams you have a lot more freedom to assemble it gradually instead of needing the whole thing to come together at once as a single unit. I totally agree with you that in theory this would probably be the best way to do it, and if we were working in sheet metal I'd be totally on board, but as it is I don't have a vision of how to make that happen in practice.

  On 1/26/2022 at 4:45 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I see what you're saying here, and you're not wrong, but I think the physical issues of building something at this scale make that very difficult. If you could get it assembled, it'd be great, but that requires figuring out how to lift a (minimum!) twelve-foot-long plate-built panel, and how to support the rest of the model before they're attached. And I don't know how many plates thick the lower hull would have to be to keep from buckling, but it'd be a whole bunch. With a frame made basically out of technic beams you have a lot more freedom to assemble it gradually instead of needing the whole thing to come together at once as a single unit. I totally agree with you that in theory this would probably be the best way to do it, and if we were working in sheet metal I'd be totally on board, but as it is I don't have a vision of how to make that happen in practice.

May need a tractor trailer rig to haul that puppy.....or a warehouse XD

See, when you lay it out like this it hardly looks crazy at all.... And also, the dimensions happen to work out perfectly. I haven't sat down and *really* crunched out the numbers to pick an exact scale yet, but my first-pass math is that the forward point section is 12130 meters long, which works out to 1042.096 studs, and the length of 26 of those forty-stud-sections is 1042.1. I didn't even do that on purpose, that's just how long it turned out to be. Clearly the Force is speaking to me.

I should probably make a new thread for this. Obviously it's an offshoot of my fleet project, but they're largely separate topics.

Edited January 26, 20223 yr by Kdapt-Preacher

I know the odds of it being built by anyone, ever, in real brick is incredibly small but I want it to be real lol. It will be a really fun thread to follow if you decide to design the whole thing.

Speaking of designing things, is the XS still in progress? Any changes since you posted it last?

  On 1/26/2022 at 10:29 PM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

See, when you lay it out like this it hardly looks crazy at all.... And also, the dimensions happen to work out perfectly. I haven't sat down and *really* crunched out the numbers to pick an exact scale yet, but my first-pass math is that the forward point section is 12130 meters long, which works out to 1042.096 studs, and the length of 26 of those forty-stud-sections is 1042.1. I didn't even do that on purpose, that's just how long it turned out to be. Clearly the Force is speaking to me.

I should probably make a new thread for this. Obviously it's an offshoot of my fleet project, but they're largely separate topics.

Scale doesn't look right to me honestly.

Maybe use the Bridge tower/shield spheres as a seed point to match?

Something seems off.

  On 1/26/2022 at 11:11 PM, Geihlen said:

I know the odds of it being built by anyone, ever, in real brick is incredibly small but I want it to be real lol. It will be a really fun thread to follow if you decide to design the whole thing.

Speaking of designing things, is the XS still in progress? Any changes since you posted it last?

Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten I hadn't posted that in a few days. I've screwed with it a fair bit, with different engines and cargo pod and a new internal structure, so now it's held together by a 2l axle in the middle instead of the bracket-clamp method. This is at the point where I think I could probably call it done and be reasonably satisfied, but I'm still thinking about whether I can do a better job of it. The cargo pod in particular still feels like there's room for improvement. And I'd like to get the small secondary engines on the sides of the main two, but I don't think that's going to happen.

  On 1/27/2022 at 12:16 AM, Kage Goomba said:

Scale doesn't look right to me honestly.

Maybe use the Bridge tower/shield spheres as a seed point to match?

Something seems off.

Because that's only the front two thirds of the ship, from the tip to the widest point of the wings. There's another 5.5 km of ship behind it. The scale is right for the 17.6 km version (which is how it's depicted in the movie, not 8 km, 12.5 km, 19 km, or any of the other lengths that've been given in various reference books). But also, this is going to look a bit weird because we're all so used to seeing the ship depicted as far narrower than it really is. This is going to be almost 50% wider than the official LEGO set, for example, so if that's the version you're most familiar with (as is true for me and probably the majority of folks on this forum), your first impression will be that the proportions are way off, but this is what it actually looks like.

  On 1/27/2022 at 1:21 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Ah, yeah, I'd forgotten I hadn't posted that in a few days. I've screwed with it a fair bit, with different engines and cargo pod and a new internal structure, so now it's held together by a 2l axle in the middle instead of the bracket-clamp method. This is at the point where I think I could probably call it done and be reasonably satisfied, but I'm still thinking about whether I can do a better job of it. The cargo pod in particular still feels like there's room for improvement. And I'd like to get the small secondary engines on the sides of the main two, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Because that's only the front two thirds of the ship, from the tip to the widest point of the wings. There's another 5.5 km of ship behind it. The scale is right for the 17.6 km version (which is how it's depicted in the movie, not 8 km, 12.5 km, 19 km, or any of the other lengths that've been given in various reference books). But also, this is going to look a bit weird because we're all so used to seeing the ship depicted as far narrower than it really is. This is going to be almost 50% wider than the official LEGO set, for example, so if that's the version you're most familiar with (as is true for me and probably the majority of folks on this forum), your first impression will be that the proportions are way off, but this is what it actually looks like.

We don't talk about the official lego model >.>;;;;;

 

But yes now it makes sense.

https://imgur.com/a/S4DWdig

Still thinking about Imperial hangars. A lot of them seem to be a sort of modular design at different scales--you can see in the various shots of people landing on the Death Stars that they tend to come in clusters of different sizes, usually with a couple of small hangars flanking a large one, so that's what I've got here. The two on the right are each 6x6 studs, and are stackable and tile-able so they can be easily dropped into the side of any wall or whatever. Those are about the size of Docking Bay 327, more or less; they hold a squadron of 12 TIE/lns (as shown there), or a Millennium Falcon-sized ship comfortably, or a Lambda very uncomfortably (my little Lambda design sadly doesn't fold up nearly as tightly as the real thing, so it does fit in there but only just barely). The one on the left is 12x12 and similarly stackable, so it meshes conveniently with the squadron hangars. That one's a good fit for several shuttles, medium freighters or gunships (Gozantis, for example), AT-AT landing barges, and so forth. Ships larger than that probably rarely enter pressurized hangars, but a ship the size of Executor would definitely have at least one or two hangars large enough to 'drydock' something like a Lancer or Carrack or a bit larger (not a Vic or ImpStar, though). That capability has never been shown in canon, as far as I know, but it's got, like, ten cubic kilometers of space in that ventral cutout, so it has to be doing something with it.

Executor would have a lot of these little hangars. The official complement is 144 TIEs, but that's obviously absurd. Executor is about 170 million times larger than a TIE fighter, so even if it only devotes, say, 1% of its internal volume to hangars (which isn't very bloody much), and even if only 1% of the hangar volume actually translates to stored fighters (which is a *serious* underestimate, by probably a factor of 10), that still leaves us with something like 17,000 TIEs, and there's easily room for that many hangars on the model. They've never really been shown, but that 4x2-stud door opening is too small to be readily visible against the scale of the ship, so they're almost certainly scattered all over. Would I actually include that many in the model? I mean... it's not like that's gonna be the biggest logistical hurdle with this thing, so definitely maybe? That's only $2500 worth of nano TIEs. No big deal....

  On 1/28/2022 at 4:51 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

https://imgur.com/a/S4DWdig

Still thinking about Imperial hangars. A lot of them seem to be a sort of modular design at different scales--you can see in the various shots of people landing on the Death Stars that they tend to come in clusters of different sizes, usually with a couple of small hangars flanking a large one, so that's what I've got here. The two on the right are each 6x6 studs, and are stackable and tile-able so they can be easily dropped into the side of any wall or whatever. Those are about the size of Docking Bay 327, more or less; they hold a squadron of 12 TIE/lns (as shown there), or a Millennium Falcon-sized ship comfortably, or a Lambda very uncomfortably (my little Lambda design sadly doesn't fold up nearly as tightly as the real thing, so it does fit in there but only just barely). The one on the left is 12x12 and similarly stackable, so it meshes conveniently with the squadron hangars. That one's a good fit for several shuttles, medium freighters or gunships (Gozantis, for example), AT-AT landing barges, and so forth. Ships larger than that probably rarely enter pressurized hangars, but a ship the size of Executor would definitely have at least one or two hangars large enough to 'drydock' something like a Lancer or Carrack or a bit larger (not a Vic or ImpStar, though). That capability has never been shown in canon, as far as I know, but it's got, like, ten cubic kilometers of space in that ventral cutout, so it has to be doing something with it.

Executor would have a lot of these little hangars. The official complement is 144 TIEs, but that's obviously absurd. Executor is about 170 million times larger than a TIE fighter, so even if it only devotes, say, 1% of its internal volume to hangars (which isn't very bloody much), and even if only 1% of the hangar volume actually translates to stored fighters (which is a *serious* underestimate, by probably a factor of 10), that still leaves us with something like 17,000 TIEs, and there's easily room for that many hangars on the model. They've never really been shown, but that 4x2-stud door opening is too small to be readily visible against the scale of the ship, so they're almost certainly scattered all over. Would I actually include that many in the model? I mean... it's not like that's gonna be the biggest logistical hurdle with this thing, so definitely maybe? That's only $2500 worth of nano TIEs. No big deal....

This is why I laugh at people who say "canon" (in response to my contestment) and I say "ST#U" - cause common sense rules regardless.

Little blurb I found :

  Quote

The standard complement of starfighters is claimed to be two wings, totaling 144 fightercraft, although the size of the mothership's docking cavities indicate that it could easily accommodate dozens or perhaps hundreds of times more. During the years before the Battle of Hoth each wing typically included one squadron of TIE Interceptors and one of TIE Bombers. In later times more advanced starfighter models (eg. the elite TIE Avenger and TIE Defender fighters) would have become a greater component. TIE assault craft, shuttles, ground assault dropships and service / maintenance vehicles bring the total number of carried ships to over two hundred. For surface actions 25 AT-AT, 50 AT-ST walkers and similar numbers of other ground assault vehicles are reportedly carried. Three spare prefabricated garrison bases are kept aboard each Executor-class command ship for rapid assembly on planets which need lasting pacification measures.

Not sure where the #### they got 144 Fighters - my encyclopedia doesn't even say how many - just its cavernous.
So it could be a baseline starting point but its got space for much much more.

Also TIE fighters don't necessarily launch from hangers - some use "drop racks" - TIE Fighter Game is a good example of that.

Cant find an image - but the hard ceiling hull off a Star Destroyer (ISD class) you see those squares - hatches open up and they drop TIE's like drop pods - faster deployment that way. (Or any compatible ship)

Not much documented - but its an obvious design aspect that makes sense for combat.

Edited January 28, 20223 yr by Kage Goomba

I'm living for this hangar stuff. The idea of getting to find ways to flesh the model out with details like this is super cool. It also allows for some artistic license. If you were to build a 47 foot USS Enterprise for example, the size of that ship is well documented. There's schematics for it, and just about every deck has been planned out in some form or fashion. Even if some sources differ, you could follow a source down to nearly the rivets on the bulkheads if you looked hard enough.

But the Executor is different. It's never been laid out like that, as far as I know. And I wouldn't blame anyone for not bothering, it's huge. None of that was probably even taken into consideration when the model was built. I could imagine them just saying, "we need a bigger, more imposing one of these. We need to show the Empire is still dead serious". It allows for some fun extrapolation and detailing on a project like this.

  On 1/28/2022 at 5:38 AM, Kage Goomba said:

Not sure where the #### they got 144 Fighters - my encyclopedia doesn't even say how many - just its cavernous.

So it could be a baseline starting point but its got space for much much more.

Also TIE fighters don't necessarily launch from hangers - some use "drop racks" - TIE Fighter Game is a good example of that.

Cant find an image - but the hard ceiling hull off a Star Destroyer (ISD class) you see those squares - hatches open up and they drop TIE's like drop pods - faster deployment that way. (Or any compatible ship)

Not much documented - but its an obvious design aspect that makes sense for combat.

Most of those kinds of stats ultimately derive from the old West End Games RPG sourcebooks. They make sense in that context. I'm sure that whoever originally wrote that knew perfectly well that that was a tiny fraction of the fighters it would 'actually' carry, but to be useful to them it had to get cut down to something that could be fought against, and compared to the typical Star Wars RPG gameplay 144 fighters was still an enormous number. The problems only start when those numbers get copied verbatim into an Essential Guide or wherever instead of being treated as gameplay mechanics.

The drop racks for TIEs are still solid canon, since that's still how they're carried by Gozantis. Do you know what the source is for ISDs launching them like that, though? The version I'm familiar with from the Incredible Cross-Sections books has the TIEs scrambling from deployment chute things out of the sides of the hangar.

  On 1/28/2022 at 7:25 AM, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Most of those kinds of stats ultimately derive from the old West End Games RPG sourcebooks. They make sense in that context. I'm sure that whoever originally wrote that knew perfectly well that that was a tiny fraction of the fighters it would 'actually' carry, but to be useful to them it had to get cut down to something that could be fought against, and compared to the typical Star Wars RPG gameplay 144 fighters was still an enormous number. The problems only start when those numbers get copied verbatim into an Essential Guide or wherever instead of being treated as gameplay mechanics.

The drop racks for TIEs are still solid canon, since that's still how they're carried by Gozantis. Do you know what the source is for ISDs launching them like that, though? The version I'm familiar with from the Incredible Cross-Sections books has the TIEs scrambling from deployment chute things out of the sides of the hangar.

The 144 number is totally RPG-esque. - The fact it continues to linger is worthy of making my twitch till I'm blind.

Pretty sure any DM would be a little overwhelmed and put out when someone "hypers" in a SSD and drops 1000 fighters on the "first wave" just to "steam roll" anyone in their way. Shield-less or not.

http://fractalsponge.net/?p=3430

Here's a good take on the ISD 's "Ceiling drop" bays.

 

Still digging...

Found this - oddly there's not one damn video on the net.

People love skipping cut-scenes.

TIE Bomber - hatch opens up below - rack tilts - down she goes into space - rapid deployment system.

Likening to Babylon 5's way of launching Star Fury's

Not quite as elegant in terms of how an ISD does it from what little we know - but you get the idea.

 

Edited January 28, 20223 yr by Kage Goomba