Obscure Ship From the Thrawn Trilogy Comic Books

All right, guys, Here's the panel texture for one of the top surfaces.:




It's based on the detailed drawing, but, obviously since the proportions on that version are different than the final ship in the book, I had to futz the details. It's all eye-balled and handled very freely. It does obscure almost all of the original engraving I started with, but I like this effect better anyhow, so, totally worth it. There will be a few little details added from kit parts, but I decided to show what I got done so far.

This is the result of an hour here and and hour there, most every day since I last posted on Sunday. At this rate, I expect the other five side will take weeks to finish up, and I probably won't show any progress till all the sides are paneled and I'm ready to paint. I dunno, maybe I can do it quicker. We'll see. If I manage to get more free weekend time than I think I will, I might be able to marathon my way through it.

Note those horizontal vent-looking thingies.... I laid those down one strip at a time and it took forever. Three of them I think look good, but one of them I really wasn't happy with... then I realized I was a dummy because I forgot that there's such a thing as styrene sheet with a clapboard surface already on it. D'oh! So I went to the hobby store and grabbed one and used it to replace the one vent I didn't like. This is gonna save me some time on the other five sides... I just wish I had remembered it earlier...

All right, then; until painting time...

--Alex
 
Awesome work, Alex !!! LOVE this a lot !!!

Forgot to talk about something essential in my latest post : Where is the bloody cockpit located on that ship ?
That detail never bothered me when I initially designed that ship because we were under constant deadlines pressure so you had to think and work fast ! (I remember that we were late at some point during the production of this series, one month late, so an issue had to be cancelled and re-scheduled... That's when the Dark Horse guys wanted to fire us... These guys wanted grade A quality work delivered at the speed required to produce crap and they were always late on payment... anyhow our asses were saved by Lucie Wilson at Lucasfilm because they loved our work very much, thank you again Lucie !)

OK, back to the cockpit location : To me it was located between the huge crates at the bow of the ship, just below the triangular arms... but if you don't like the idea then just ignore it, no prob at all on my side ! (the cockpit could also be located inside the ship or it could be 100% automatic)

Fred
 
I'm trying to figure out the scale of this thing. I know one of your drawings had a sketchy little X-Wing for scale, but I wonder if that would make the ship too small to hold 50 TIE fighters along with those drill thingies Thrawn had stolen from Lando's crew. I figure if you could have a block of TIEs 4x4x3 you have 48, and maybe the 50 was rounded off, or maybe there are two more tucked away.

(I'd have to re-read the comic book... I'm not sure if that 50 figure is from thee or I imagined it somehow... It's too late to check now, but now it's got me thinking.)

I guess I was imagining that any habitable space would be along the upper spine, and everything below would be cargo and machinery. I'm not adverse to having a control cabin forward that is visible. But I would want to nail down a plausible scale before doing that.

I'm on it.

--Alex

P.S. You're story about almost getting fired reminds me of something I heard once and have been a firm believer in ever since: A late product is only late til it hits the shelves; a crappy product is crappy forever.

--Alex
 
Okay, so I did some figuring on scale.

There is an image of the Bulk Freighter alongside a Star Destroyer in the comic. In other images, it seems to be floating right above the ISD, just left of the centerline. So I assumed it would give me an idea of relative scale.




An ISD at 1,600 m long being about 530% longer than the Bulk Freighter yields about a 300 m long Freighter. Since my model is about a foot long, which is about 30 cm, it looks like my model is near enough to 1:1000 scale.

Awesome.

So to see about TIE Fighters, I made one out of cardstock at 1:1000 scale.




So, the paneling is going faster than I feared it would. Here, I show the completed starboard side. Notice the 1:1000 TIE at the bottom right of the image:




So, basically, at this size, there's no problem at all fitting 50 TIEs in there, leaving plenty of room for drills. This also means there is plenty of room inside for a crew and a control cabin... I'm leaning away from having an external control room. Although, I'f I'm finishing up the details and something inspires me, I might change my mind yet.

--Alex.



P.S.
Since I know you're all wondering what a TIE Fighter parked on top of the Enterprise would look like...

 
Albertese said:
P.S. You're story about almost getting fired reminds me of something I heard once and have been a firm believer in ever since: A late product is only late til it hits the shelves; a crappy product is crappy forever.

--Alex
Click to expand...

Thank you Alex, that's also what we thought at the time we were working on this...

:facepalm

LOVE your detective work and deduction about the size of the ship and how many TIE it was able to transport !
Must admit I never really thought about it that seriously when I worked on the pages, again we were under constant pressure...
I'm really glad to see we nailed it anyhow... oh, and that paneling definitely rocks, can't wait to see the whole ship primered !

:cool

Fred
 
BTW I found another imperial vehicle especially designed for that miniseries in my files this afternoon...
This one was based on a speeder bike...
It was supposed to be larger than a regular bike and able to transport 4 to 6 troopers + the pilot.
The main inspiration for this was the WW2 german SdKfz 2, but adapted to the SW universe...

As you can see it has "arms" on the bow that are close to the ones seen on the Imperial Thuna ship...

Fred

IMPERIAL LAV.jpg
 
Hey, Fred, that large speeder is definitely on my to-do list... I plan to make it a convenient size for use with 30mm RPG figures...

In other news, I've been tooling away on the Bulk Freighter. I thought it'd be cool to have a section where some plating had been removed and some innards were visible.

So, I built this insert. It's made of a CA cap, a drawing pen cap, and a whole bunch of little guns. (I got a pack of about 50 or so 1:35 scale automatic weapons. Also there's a gun from a 1:700 battleship and a 1:72 Apache helicopter.)




Here it is fitted into the hull.




And here it is with the outer paneling around it.





You can see it's mostly all hidden, but the idea is just that there's something in there that will be visible if you look for it.

Anyhow, just a few more things to finish before the painting begins in earnest. I already painted this insert, seeing as how it'll be inaccessible later. (You can see the base color I sprayed above on my thumbnail... I'm not the kind of guy who normally paints his nails....)

--Alex
 
All right, everything is built! Here's a pic of the side showing the kit parts I used. Most of these came from a 1:48 F-15.




(There's also an easter egg on the ship's side. Who sees it without an obvious hint?)

The rest of it is primed. I'll probably start painting in earnest tomorrow.

--Alex
 
Thanks guys!

So, I have pretty much finished this beast. The painting/weathering is all done. All I need is layer of dullcoat which I'll spray tomorrow in the daylight.

I took a few pics of the assembled model.













So, hopefully tomorrow I'll get a chance to make some nice beauty shots of the ship with a starfield and with the engine lights on. It feels good to have this thing done though. Thanks for the encouragement, everyone!

--Alex
 
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