[M4-23 - Imperial Ship] TIE/Ad x7

[Sylyphics]

TIE/Ad x7 under development by Sy Lyphics, on Flickr

The TIE/AD x7, aka the TIE advanced x7, was a prototype TIE Series starfighter by Sienar Fleet Systems that would later become the TIE Defender. It was developed at the Sienar Advanced Research Division on Corulag, notable for its bamboo forests and loyalty to the Empire.

"Sir, the holo quality was awful, are you sure he said brown not down?"
"... Just paint."

 

Barely made the deadline, designing the TIE advanced x7/TIE Defender from scratch took the whole 2 months. It's minifig scale, and based on an amalgamation of its most common features from various depictions, as each source depicts the ship differently. There's also a second AD x7 here on the workbench likewise being painted, though much smaller, so technically this entry is the same ship twice a differing scales. With the way digital technology is in Star Wars, I think it's likely that they also create smaller scale mock ups physically during the design process.

The AD x7 is same as the Defender, but missing the top ion cannons, cockpit missiles, and the hyperdrive. I also took photos of the AD x7 with a different background from my Defender, as the mood and story I wanted to convey with the scene seemed to be lighter in tone. My Defender variant, without the story with instructions in the main form here, as I didn't want to mix the two ships and story:

 

Edited June 6, 2023 by Sylyphics

[Yperio_Bricks]

Fantastic ship and a nice sidebuild with the ground crew! The wings look great, as does the cockpit! I also like the greebling on the back.

[MKJoshA]

Wow, is that a new cockpit technique !?! Great work all around.

[Sylyphics]

14 hours ago, Yperio_Bricks said:

Fantastic ship and a nice sidebuild with the ground crew! The wings look great, as does the cockpit! I also like the greebling on the back.

Thanks!

7 hours ago, MKJoshA said:

Wow, is that a new cockpit technique !?! Great work all around.

Thanks and yep, novel cockpit; the desire to design a new cockpit technique was one of my main motivations for tackling a TIE variant. Chose the AD x7 for having the most ball cockpit as I realty wanted to capture the spherical nature of the TIE series.

[thomas_jenkins_bricks]

Great model! You came up with a great solution for the cockpit. I used a similar technique in a MOC a while back, so maybe I'm a bit biased. Brick-built TIE fighter wings are a bit of a mind-bender too: creating the right shapes with clean edges and bordering them with Grey is not an easy feat. This is very refined and clean looking. I think this will do very well in the contest, good luck! 

[MstrOfPppts]

Awesome job man! Love the round shape of the cockpit as well as the snoted wings. Really one of my favorite entries and I'm not even a ship guy (:

[Sylyphics]

On 6/6/2023 at 8:53 PM, thomas_jenkins_bricks said:

Great model! You came up with a great solution for the cockpit. I used a similar technique in a MOC a while back, so maybe I'm a bit biased. Brick-built TIE fighter wings are a bit of a mind-bender too: creating the right shapes with clean edges and bordering them with Grey is not an easy feat. This is very refined and clean looking. I think this will do very well in the contest, good luck! 

Thanks, and neat it is the same technique for the triangle! I toyed with using instead part 1941 the ninjago weapon holder, as it has the same triangle shape needed to fill part of the gap between the 6x6 dishes and related shapes, but it was too noisy a look and departed from the smoothness. The biggest challenge were the wedge slopes need to continue the shaping past the triangles, and due to limited space they are actually attached using 3 completely different techniques in different parts of the build.

The brick built wings also were tricky, as I wanted them to be accurate and robust but also like the rest of the build not use any illegal techniques which would stress pieces. The rear of the wing actually needed a slight trick with that, as the tiny irregularity of the 1x1 inverted bracket piece makes it push up pieces almost unnoticeably but it does. Not sure why Lego made that (I think 0.5 LDU) offset. In any case, by making the rear grey trim out of 1x2 tiles, which have no underside stud supports, allows the parts to push together the 0.25 LDU part tolerances in between them and solve the 0.5 LDU extra issue cleanly.

 

22 hours ago, MstrOfPppts said:

Awesome job man! Love the round shape of the cockpit as well as the snoted wings. Really one of my favorite entries and I'm not even a ship guy (:

Thank you, and not being a ship guy makes the compliment better!

[n1majneb]

Nailed that sphere of a cockpit

 

[Crazy bricks]

My word, give the rest of us a chance at winning! This is spectacular, if I win this category ahead of you I'll feel like a fraud!!

[Jody Meyer]

ok, I might want the file for this one....great build, love the little ground crew.