[M4-22 - Alphabet Fighter] T-wing Heavy Assault Craft

[Mandalorianknight]

Hello, here's my alphabet fighter submission. My first time doing a stud.io moc with no reference material, since the T-wing (THIS T-wing, there is one in legends, but it's...it's bad.) isn't a real thing but my own idea. I had three ideas I wanted to incorporate into the design:

-I wanted the ship to fulfill a unique purpose. Not a standard bomber or interceptor. I think I succeeded in this, which I'll get into more in the lore segment.

-Design-wise, I wanted to incorporate an angled design I've used before on my A and B wing mocs, which you see here in the wings. It uses angled plates and curves to get a smooth angle. This is one of the better techniques I've come up with, so I wanted to use it in the submission.

-I also wanted to have the windscreen at an angle, gunship-style. No real reason for this one, I just like that type of thing on ships.

"The T-wing heavy assault craft was a starfighter designed by the Incom Corporation in 3 ABY at the request of admiral Gial Ackbar. The craft is, due to a heavy amount of computational equipment, able to preform extremely specific hyperspace jumps to the point of being able to jump into a planetary atmosphere. In addition, it holds a heavy missile payload that can quickly lock on to and obliterate ground or air targets. Unfortunately, to hold the missile payload, navigational equipment, and powerful hyperdrive, the ship sacrifices maneuverability and shielding. Another issue was that once the missiles were expended, the T-wing's crew were reliant on two small laser cannons located near the cockpit for self-defense. Members of the alliance raised ethical concerns about the low shielding, and the ship was not put into wide production. However, aside from the prototypes produced for the rebellion, a single squadron that saw combat at endor, Incom went on to produce the ship for planetary defense forces during the era of the new republic. These ships, however, replaced the navigational equipment for better shielding. Certain bounty hunters saw value in the T-wing's unique hyperjump capabilities, and a few copies were created on commission in 6 ABY that were able to fit both the navigational equipment and shielding within the ship, though at such a price to make their production in large numbers impractical."

"The T-wing was equipped with two powerful engines towards the rear. Speed wasn't an issue, although maneuverability was somewhat impaired." You can see that technique I was talking about on the wings here. I like how it turned out.

"The T-wing could hold upwards of 40 mass driver missiles, fired from rocket pods at the wingtips. A hatch on the underside of the ship would be opened to fit the missiles, which were then belt-fed along the wings into the wingtip rocket pods." To be honest I'm not sure why I built that trapdoor thing in, there are other compartments in the ship. Nice place to load the missiles in-universe, though.

"The T-wing had a crew consisting of a Pilot, Navigator/Gunner, and astromech. The Pilot was able to focus on piloting the craft and defense with the cockpit laser cannons, while the navigator/gunner helped compute and execute microjumps into planetary atmospheres before taking on the gunner role once at the target to fire the missiles. The astromech was necessary due to the sheer computational power required for the precision hyperjumps."  I like my seat design here, like I said the angled windscreen was a big goal of the model too. 

"A rear compartment on the ship could be accessed that contained storage and hyperdrive unit access."  I had no idea what to do with all the space inside this thing. I thought about making it hold a few alliance paratroopers, but thought the extra figures might be against the rules. Ultimately I think the hyperdrive and tool rack is fine, though I might try and do a separate, non-contest modification that holds the paratroopers.

"The T-wing got it's name due to it's resemblance to the High Galactic letter, as part of a running theme with the starfighters Incom designed for the alliance."  I mean, it's T-shaped. Not the hardest letter to pull off, but I think it's pretty clearly T-shaped. I want to try a wackier one like R or F later if I have the time.

The ship's wings can angle horizontally for landing.

Anyway, let me know what you think! I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, but I welcome any feedback you've got. 

Oh, and the ship has lime because I wanted to use green (since none of the standard paint jobs for alliance ships use green, though we have red, maroon, yellow, blue, and even orange), and lime was the only shade of green that those 2x3.5 wedges came in.

Edited June 27, 2022 by Mandalorianknight
Edit June 26: Added a background and lasers to the first render

[Brickshipyard]

Awesome T-wing design Mandlorianknight and I like it better than legends one which was such a weak craft. Like an after thought. You incorporated a lot of clean angles and a catching color scheme. I know you had to follow the rules of the contest, but the rear compartment does have the perfect setup for a passenger bay. Maybe later you can make into a drop-ship.

[CrappyMocMaker]

This looks great! I like the way you did the wings, especially the undersides with the missiles

[Mandalorianknight]

On 5/27/2022 at 3:14 AM, Brickshipyard said:

Awesome T-wing design Mandlorianknight and I like it better than legends one which was such a weak craft. Like an after thought. You incorporated a lot of clean angles and a catching color scheme. I know you had to follow the rules of the contest, but the rear compartment does have the perfect setup for a passenger bay. Maybe later you can make into a drop-ship.

Yeah, the legends one looks awful. 

I think I'll post some mods of the base design later (a bounty hunter one, a dropship, and one in New Republic livery) in this thread, and just put a headline above them saying that they are NOT an update to my entry, just mods of the base model.

13 hours ago, CrappyMocMaker said:

This looks great! I like the way you did the wings, especially the undersides with the missiles

Thanks! The idea to have it fire missiles as a primary weapon instead of laser cannons was actually inspired by your TIE jacalus, though I took care to have a different loading and firing mechanism so as to not plagiarize.  

[Mandalorianknight]

Sorry for the double post, but here are the mods (admittedly more of recolors). Again, these are NOT ENTRIES THEMSELVES. The base model is the entry. 

T-wing (dropship):

"One oft-forgotten part of the T-wing's production history was that around 5 ABY, the new republic did quietly purchase a few squadrons of the base design with some interior modifications. Instead of the fully powered hyperdrives and full missile loadout, this variation of the T-wing had an interior dropship that could load a small team of commandos. This ship was able to jump into a system, then preform a microjump into the atmosphere. As a result of this ability being maintained despite the space needed for troops, the T-wing dropship had NO shielding and very little ability to guide it's missiles precisely to targets. The lack of any shielding or any offensive/self defense capabilities meant that this ship was kept a dirty little secret of the New Republic Intelligence division."

Yeah, so here's the mod. I didn't do a render of the interior, because it's literally just carving out the interior of the base T-wing. It also lowers the dropship trapdoor a bit, which as it turns out, was unwarranted. The ship can hold around 4 specforces troopers, although you have to get a little wacky with their helmets if you use the fleet trooper helmets. In an attempt to make it more than carving the interior, I did change the greebling a little as well.

 

T-wing (Hunter craft):

"As mentioned in many accounts of the T-wing, Incom sold modified, extremely expensive T-wings to highly successful bounty hunters. These T-wings combined that hyperdrive capability with solid shields at incredible cost, and as such, only the most elite bounty hunters purchased them. This particular ship was clearly not purchased directly from incom, and likely stolen or scavenged after the loss of it's owner by men unable to mantain it. Pockmarked with dents, holes, and a damaged engine, the fact that it's still flying at all is a tribute to the enhanced defensive capabilities of this variant."

A lot more changes to the greebling of this craft, including parts to represent damage and a larger amount of greebling on the back. The interior was changed a little to fit a bounty, but not too much. 

 

Anyway, thanks for looking at these, let me know if you have any other modifications you'd like to see.

Edited June 27, 2022 by Mandalorianknight
More render backgrounds for the first image of each mod

[CrappyMocMaker]

These new variants look great! I like the color changes for the Hunter craft.

Some other ideas that you could use for the back is add a rear gunner post (although you'd have to take out one of the pilots if you want it as a valid entry), an escape pod, or a functioning bombing mechanism.

Edited May 31, 2022 by CrappyMocMaker
more suggestions

[Mandalorianknight]

On 5/30/2022 at 11:48 PM, CrappyMocMaker said:

These new variants look great! I like the color changes for the Hunter craft.

Some other ideas that you could use for the back is add a rear gunner post (although you'd have to take out one of the pilots if you want it as a valid entry), an escape pod, or a functioning bombing mechanism.

Thank you! I went back to add backgrounds to the first renders and realized I missed this comment. The Gunner post and Escape pod are great ideas and definately going to be upcoming mods now, though I'm crunching on a pretty tall physical 12x12, so I might not finish them until after the contest, and as such just post them in the general SW forum. As for the working bombing feature, it pretty much already exists, it'd just be putting different ammo in that bottom trapdoor.

[MKJoshA]

So the wedge plate you use on the nose in the first picture Lego hasn't made in Olive Green yet. I'm going to let the entry pass though because your variants use colors that do exist in Lego's part and color palette.

[Mandalorianknight]

21 minutes ago, MKJoshA said:

So the wedge plate you use on the nose in the first picture Lego hasn't made in Olive Green yet. I'm going to let the entry pass though because your variants use colors that do exist in Lego's part and color palette.

No, wait! It's lime green! So it does exist. All those parts are in lime.

In fact, the whole reason it's lime is because that wedge doesn't come in many colors, and I wanted to use it on the missile pods. I talk about it at the end of the first post in the thread

Edited July 8, 2022 by Mandalorianknight

[MKJoshA]

2 minutes ago, Mandalorianknight said:

No, wait! It's lime green! So it does exist. All those parts are in lime.

In fact, the whole reason it's lime is because that wedge doesn't come in many colors, and I wanted to use it on the missile pods. I talk about it at the end of the first post in the thread

My mistake, I missed that last paragraph.

[Mandalorianknight]

Just now, MKJoshA said:

My mistake, I missed that last paragraph.

No problem. There's a lot of entries, and you can't be expected to do a close read of every single one. The lighting for mine certainly doesn't help either, it does look kind of olive.