Category Archives: Starships

UPF Minelayer Model and Miniature

This is not the post I had planned for this week, but since I’ve been up to my ears getting the next issue of the Frontier Explorer ready to go, I didn’t have time to do the post I had planned. You’ll probably get that one next week.

With the Assault Carriers (UPF & Sathar) completed, it was time to tackle the last of the UPF ships needed for the Second Sathar War game: the UPF Minelayer.

Now, this is a bit of an interesting ship to do the mini for. If we look at the counter from the game (shown at right), those familiar with the miniatures produced by TSR will realize that a miniature already exists with that silhouette.

This is the miniature labeled on the blister pack as the Sathar Cutter. This particular one is missing one of it’s cannons but it’s a really close match for the shape on the counter.

This isn’t the first time that TSR messed up the labeling of ship images as the counters and the “Ship Identification Guide” in the Tactical Operations Manual don’t match up. We can probably assume that they had this miniatures and its silhouette and since the cutter doesn’t have game stats (until fans created them – see Frontier Explorer issue 2 – Friend or Foe), they used the image for the UPF Minelayer but didn’t change the name on the blister pack. In the blister pack, it is sold with the Sathar Frigate so my guess is that it was supposed to be a sathar ship but the silhouette was used for the UPF Minelayer by accident.

In any case, it poses a bit of dilemma. We need to make a ship that at least sort of looks like the counter to continue with the theme of the miniatures I’ve been creating but it also can’t look exactly like the sathar ship. This is also why I saved this miniature for last as you could always use the Sathar Cutter mini as the UPF minelayer in your game as it matches the game counter. So with that background out of the way, let’s look at the ship.

UPF Minelayer Miniature

Since I’m not planning on matching the shape of the silhouette on the counter exactly, I want to look at the broad features of the silhouette for inspiration. In my mind there are four main features to be considered:

  1. The body should be somewhat roundish and elongated
  2. There should be two side lobes off the main body
  3. There should be two guns mounted forward on the main body
  4. The engines should be long and skinny.

Now that last one doesn’t match with any of the engines on any of the other UPF ships. However, I’ve always felt that the minelayer, unlike the mainline ships, used ion engines instead of atomic engines. It’s really more of a system ship that does its work before the battle starts so it doesn’t need the performance of the main warships.

And the game stats bear this idea out. Ion engines are limited to an ADF of 1 and that is what the minelayer has, unlike all the other ships which have an ADF of at least 2. So these long skinny engines can be the UPF ion engines instead of atomic ones.

The two guns really aren’t an issue either as the minelayer sports a pair of laser batteries in addition to the mine and seeker missile dispensers. And the other features are just things to keep in mind while designing the ship. The minelayer is listed as hull size 7, so in the end, the ship should be a bit bigger than the UPF Destroyer when it is all done. With those design constraints, let’s get to work.

The image to the right shows the finished model. Instead of the smooth rounded body of the Sathar Cutter, I chose to go with a more angular squashed cylinder and then add cylindrical lobes to the side somewhat like the UPF Assault Carrier.

The two laser batteries are mounted on the front of the ship and the engines are long, tapered to the back, and, although you can’t easily see it in this image, angled slightly inward at the back as are the engines on the silhouette.

Beyond that I added some surface features reminiscent of the other UPF vessels and then a bunch of small cylindrical indentations on the back of the fuselage to represent the mine dispersal system. In the model, they are all at different angles so that mines are spread out as they are ejected.

Printing the Miniature

With the model made, it was time to print. Since this is a relatively small miniature, the print only took about 5 hours. Here is the UPF Minelayer next to the sathar cutter and UPF frigate, as well as a ruler for scale.

The engines didn’t come out as straight as I’d like. I’ll need to add some more supports to them on future prints to get them to hold the right positions.

As you can see, the ship is a bit bigger than the cutter and the body is bigger than the main part of the frigate as well. It’s also bigger than the destroyer although I don’t have a picture of that one. While it’s not as long, it is about as thick and much wider so I feel that it came in at right about the correct size to be just a bit bigger than the frigate and the destroyer.

This model just about used up all of my grey resin so I’ll probably be printing in the black or white resins until I get some more grey ordered. The grey (and white) take longer to print as they are opaque resins and need more curing time but I definitely like the look of the grey miniatures. At least they photograph better than any of the others.

Up Next

I finished this model a couple of weeks ago so my Patreon supporters already have the model file. I’ll be posting it on DriveThruRPG shortly with all the other models on my 3D Models page. I’ve also added it to the Miniatures Price List here on the site.

That completes all the UPF and Sathar ships. I’m probably going to revisit the fighters soon as I need to make those models more friendly to FDM printers. The models I created work on an SLA printer but the wings are too thin (by about a factor of 5-10) to print on a regular FDM printer. I want to make the models easier to print on FDM printers (or at least versions that are) before I post those models on DriveThruRPG.

But before I do that, I’m going to tackle the last military vessel that I haven’t reproduced from the original miniature sets, the pirate frigate. That’s a ship that came in the Sathar ships box of miniatures along with the pirate assault scout which I have already reproduced. I’ve already started on the model, so once I get issue 27 of the Frontier Explorer out the door, I’ll get back to it.

Once the pirate frigate model is complete, I’ll be in a position to start offering “module packs” of printed miniatures that contain all the ships needed for the Knight Hawks scenarios from the various modules as well as the UPF Task Forces. I may need to make a few more models for some of those (the Gullwind and Elanor Moraes come immediately to mind) but that will give me some direction for future builds.

After the pirate frigate, there are just 7 ships from the original sets left to recreate: the freighter from the Federation Ships box and the six ships from the Privateers box. Those will be my next projects, interspersed with the models needed for the module packs, after reworking the fighters.

What are your thoughts on the minelayer model? Let me know in the comment section below.

Sathar Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

With the UPF Assault Carrier completed, it was time to tackle the Sathar Assault Carrier. This would complete all of the capital ships for both sides.

Now, way back when I started this blog, I posted the outline for a sathar assault carrier project. This is not the model that project was intended to create. When I made that project outline, I never imagined I’d be this heavy into creating miniatures. Although if I ever get around to actually doing that project, the end result might be fairly similar. One major difference, however, would be that all the surface features would be actual scale rather than selected for aesthetics as they are on this model. But that’s for some undetermined future date. Let’s look at the model I have created.

Building the Model

Like the others, for this model I’m working off the silhouette from the game counter, pictured to the right. As you can see, this ship is a bit more bulky and angular than the other sathar vessels which tend to be more bulbous and curvy.

That said, there are definitely some features that fit the typical sathar ship style. We have the long skinny engines with the spherical tip, long, extended nacelles for the engines struts, and a round head separated from the body by a skinny neck. The other features that stand out are the guns on the head of the ship and the rectangular shape of the lobes on the side of the ship. I’m going to assume that the latter are the location of the bays for the fighters.

image showing a small assault carrier being approached by an assault scout and exploration vessel

Now, there is another reference for the sathar assault carrier in the rules. The image to the left comes from the module SFKH3: Face of the Enemy. This ship (bottom) is described as an older, obsolete, and smaller assault carrier no longer in main-line service by the sathar fleet. In the module, it has been converted by the sathar to serve as a mobile base for larger scout craft instead of fighter craft. So while I will probably model this ship at some time in the future, I won’t be using this image as a reference for the assault carrier model.

Like the UPF assault carrier, the sathar assault carrier should be significantly larger than the light cruiser but not quite as big as the heavy cruiser. That gave me a bit of a scale to shoot for when building the model. Once that scale was decided on, I used the counter to get the rough shape of the head and body of the ship.

Here’s the final model (pictured to the right). The size of the body, neck, and head are taken directly from the dimensions on the counter.

Given the positioning of the guns on the counter, I assumed there were three evenly spaced around the head. Since the stats for the Assault Carrier include a laser battery, a rocket battery, and a proton battery, I figured that wasn’t too much of a stretch.

The size and shape of the rectangular lobes around the center of the ship are based on the counter as well. The height of the lobes from the center of the ship match the profile height from the counter and the size of the rectangle that forms the outer face, along with the width where it intersects the hull match as well. What is different is the detail on the face. The counter shows one large rectangular shaped detail that I decided to break into three smaller ones on each lobe. each of these represent a fighter bay giving the assault carrier the capacity (per the rules) to hold up to a dozen fighters.

The other major difference is the engines. Instead of the single, long engine depicted on the counter, I went with pairs of smaller engines, similar to the ones used on the heavy cruiser. Unlike the heavy cruiser, which mounted the two engines in each cluster in-line with the engine strut, for the assault carrier, I chose to mount them perpendicular to the engine strut. Additionally, these engines are slightly shorter, a bit thicker, and have a bit more spacing between them than the ones on the heavy cruiser. Otherwise, they are similar to the heavy cruiser engines and modeled on those engines.

It’s not obvious from the image of the model, which is the intention, but I started using a slightly different technique when modeling this ship. For all the ships in the past, I’ve set a global level of detail for round objects that was fine enough for the larger bits of the ships to look smooth. This resulted in way more detail on small objects (like the spheres around the upper body) than was needed and caused the rendering time of the model to be really long. Starting with this model, I’ve been specifying the detail at the individual part level, allowing me finer control and reducing the rendering time significantly since I don’t have to put as much detail into the smaller pieces.

Printing

With the model done, it was time to print the miniature. As it turns out, this model is fairly massive. In fact, physically, it has more volume than any of the models I’ve created to date, even the UPF assault carrier. Here’s a picture of the sathar assault carrier along with the sathar heavy cruiser and light cruiser (and a quarter for scale).

The light cruiser looks kind of glowy because it was printed in a translucent resin and this particular print was hollow so the translucency really shows.

It sits right in there between the light and heavy cruiser but it is much fatter. It ended up weighing a couple of ounces, compared the ~1 ounce for the heavy cruiser and ~1/2 ounce for the light cruiser. It actually has some heft to it. I may consider printing these slightly hollow to save weight and bring the cost down. Here’s another picture with it next to the UPF assault carrier.

The two assault carriers side by side. One of the features chipped off of the aft fuselage of the sathar ship when I was trimming off the printing supports attached to it. I don’t think those supports are actually necessary and will remove them next time I print one.

As you can see, it ended up being a bit bigger even though they are supposed to be roughly the same sized ships. I probably made the sathar one a bit too big, but I like the way it turned out so I’m going to leave it be. It’s not too out of proportion to the other sathar vessels. Any downsizing I need to do will come with the next round of ships, which I’ll be designing to all be to scale with one another. However, with it being this massive, it makes sense that one of the sathar conditions for retreat in the Second Sathar War game is the loss of too many of these ships.

Up Next

That’s it for the Sathar Assault Carrier. I’ll be adding it and the UPF Assault Carrier to the Miniatures Price Table here on the site as well as uploading the model files to my 3D models page on DriveThruRPG. My Patreon supporters received the model files for both of these ships a while ago.

The next ship I’ll be tackling will be a new model for the UPF Minelayer. That may be ready by the end of the month.

Let me know what you think about the Sathar Assault Carrier in the comments below.

UPF Assault Carrier Model and Miniature

Unsurprisingly, December has been kind of hectic and I didn’t get as much time to work on this miniature as I had hoped earlier in the month but I managed to finish it in time for Christmas.

This is a model for which there is no original miniature so this one comes completely out of my imagination. Well, almost completely. Like the others I’ve created from scratch, we at least had the silhouette from the counter. Now this shop deviates significantly from the cylindrical shape of the the other capital ships in the UPF roster and actually looks a bit more like the UPF assault scout. It’s also radically different from the silhouette given in the UPF Campaign book that I’ll use for a different version. In any case, this was the basis I used for the model.

Building the Model

The first thing I needed to do was figure out a scale. According to the rules, the Assault Carrier is supposed to be hull size 16-18. This makes it a bit bigger than the light cruiser but smaller than or on par with the heavy cruiser. We’ll see how well I did with that later but based on the size of those models, I picked a scale and got started.

The first order of business was to get the basic body shape down. I knew that I didn’t what to make it as thick as it was wide since that would make it very, very massive. So while I matched the silhouette, I made the fuselage flattened rather than as thick as it was wide. I didn’t have any good idea what that circle on the silhouette was supposed to be so I just left it off. I suppose it could be a really big dome but it was right where I wanted to put the fighter hangars so I ignored it.

I again reused the standard UPF class C engine that I’ve used on all the other capital ships That makes it differ somewhat what from the silhouette as they are longer than depicted but that’s not really a big deal. The gun batteries at the nose are also a bit bigger than depicted on the counter.

With the basic shape done, it was time to add surface detail. The first thing I did was add in hangar bays for the fighters. Since an assault carrier can hold 8-12 fighters, I decided that this one would have 12 bays. There are three on each “face” of the fuselage. They are the three rectangular structures sticking out toward the back (thicker) part of the ship. Each one represents a bay for a single fighter.

After that it was just a matter of adding details to give it some character like the other ships. I turned out that there was a lot of surface to cover on this model, more than on the others. I reused some of the surface detail structures from the other models and created a few new ones for this model. I’m starting to build up quite a collection of objects.

The angled surfaces of this model provided some interesting opportunities to play with the relative rotation of the details having some parallel to the surface and other (like the hangars) not rotated to be at the same angle. For each face of the model, I composed all the surface features on a flat, vertical plane an then rotated it to be flush with the surface of the ship. This make positioning everything much easier.

When adding in all the detail, I struggled between how much regularity to include (e.g. identical, regularly spaced features) versus applying a bit of randomness. You can be the judge of whether I hit a good balance or not.

All told this model took about 8 hours of works spread out over a month of time, often in 15-20 minute increments here and there when I could find the time.

Printing

This post would have been up a bit sooner but there were some issues in getting the model printed. Well, printing was straightforward, but getting the final model rendered ran into some problems.

There is a lot of detail on the model and in the end, my laptop that I do the modeling on was unable to do the final render to the printable file at the high detail level I wanted. It kept crashing due to running out of memory. In the end I had to render it on my big computer (which I’ll probably do as a matter of course from now on as it has more memory and a faster CPU). And even then there was a weird problem in the rendering that I had to figure out. Since it took 2.75 hours to render, even on the big computer, that was not a fast process.

From this I’ve learned that I need to start being more selective and assign rendering detail at the individual element level instead of globally. The issue is really on the round pieces as you get lots of vertices in those parts that really are needed on the small parts but if you don’t have it on the larger pieces, you notice the individual faces. I’ve been setting the detail level high so the big pieces (the lobes and weapons balls in this model) look good but that’s been serious overkill on all the small parts. In the end, the raw model file for this ship was 381 MB. The next largest ones were the space station at 239MB and the battleship at 215MB. So that’s something I’ll be looking into on future models.

I finished the model Sunday afternoon and thought I’d have a print by Monday morning but all the rendering problems resulted in me not getting the print started until late Monday afternoon. It takes twelve hours to print so it just finished this morning. But it printed and it looks great. Here’s a picture of the side not shown in the model image above. It still has the printing supports on it as it’s not done curing yet. They will all get removed once that is done.

It’s still curing so I haven’t removed the printing supports yet.

I was very happy to see out it turned out. The details in the model image looked a bit over powering, maybe because of the color scheme the software uses. But printed, they looked just right.

Earlier I mentioned that we’d check in on how I did on picking the scale. Here’s a picture comparing the assault carrier with the battleship (left) and heavy cruiser (right). I probably should have included the light cruiser as well but didn’t. This image shows the side of the assault carrier that was in the model image.

The assault carrier should have roughly the same volume as the heavy cruiser. It’s shorter but much fatter. And going by the volume of resin needed, more than double the size. So on an empirical basis, I probably made it a bit too big but I actually think it looks just about right aesthetically. So I’m happy with it as it is. However, it’s way too wide to use as a chess piece if I do make a chess set with the ships so I’ll have to think about that.

Coming Up

I’ll get the model posted up on DriveThruRPG in the coming week (and updated this post with a link) as well as getting it added to my Miniature Price List page.

This finishes all the UPF models except for a new minelayer. I’m holding off on that one as you can use the sathar cutter miniature in a pinch since that one matches the silhouette of the counter in the game. I’ll revisit that model soon but next up is the Sathar Assault Carrier.

A year and a half ago when I started this blog, the Sathar Assault Carrier was one of my original projects that I’ve managed to not spend any time on. This will not be that version of the assault carrier as I wanted to create a full set of deck plans and a model that matches them like I did for the sathar destroyer. That’s a very large project. This version of the miniature will be created just as I’ve done with the UPF Heavy Cruiser and Assault Carrier – using the counter silhouette to give its shape and adding surface details based on the existing miniatures. The sathar ships are less cluttered so this should go faster.

What do you think of the UPF Assault Carrier? Let me know in the comments below.

UPF Heavy Cruiser Model and Miniature

The final model. Click for full sized image

Okay, with the UPF Battleship completed, I’ve now recreated all the original military miniatures. I still need to make the Pirate Frigate model and also the freighter and privateers but those are going to wait a bit. Before I tackle them, I want to finish all the ships in the UPF and sathar order of battle. These remaining ships are ones for which no miniature was made by TSR. There weren’t models for the fighters or destroyers either, but I’ve already made those. That leaves us with these missing ships: the UPF Minelayer (if you don’t use the sathar Cutter model), Assault Carriers for both sides, and the UPF Heavy Cruiser. The latter is the topic of today’s post. The image to the right shows the completed model. This post will talk about how we got there.

Sources

There aren’t a lot of sources for the Heavy Cruiser. For “definitive” images, we only have the silhouettes on page 6 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book (KHCB) and the game counter. You might be able to argue that some of the other ships depicted in the books are heavy cruisers, but nothing else is labeled as such. Since I’m saving the profiles from page 6 & 7 of the KHCB for a second set of miniatures I’ll produce later, we’re going to go with the image on the counter for our basic profile.

This is the image we have to work with. It has a relatively small head, wide fuselage segments and a fairly narrow “waist” region. We also notice that like the destroyer, this has a prominent cannon hanging under the bow of the ship.

Based on the data in the KHCB, the heavy cruiser should be between HS 16-18 and have 6 engines. Since the Battleship was HS 20, and the Light Cruiser is HS 12-14, this ship should fall somewhere right between those two ships in size. That’s what we have to work with, so let’s get started.

The Basic Hull

Building the basic hull was straightforward as I just had to measure the relative sizes of the various parts of the ship and scale them appropriately. There were two main deviations. The first was the engine region. The images on the counters show small engine structures. Since the light cruiser and the battleship both use the same engine design, I intend to reuse that engine here on the heavy cruiser as well. That necessitated making the engine region just a tad bigger than what is shown on the counter, and the engines will stick out further from the body of the ship.

The second variation was in the bow or “head” of the ship. The rules say that heavy cruisers are all old ships. That, combined with the fact that the bow of the ship looks kind of small compared to the body of the ship, led me to make the decision to use the same bow portion on this model as I used for the light cruiser, similar to how I used the same head on the destroyer that I did on the frigate. This gives us the following basic profile.

Adding Details

Next I decided to reuse some of the major elements from both the light cruiser and the battleship. On the aft portion of the fuselage, I used the domed structure from the back of the battleship but only placed three of them compared to the battleship’s four.

Then on the forward fuselage, I used the cannons from the light cruiser placing four of those compared to the light cruiser’s three emplacements. I also add the external cannon onto the bow of the ship. Along the way I also added in the crenelated trim at the edges of the cylinder sections. That gave me this profile.

That was the relatively easy part as I was reusing major structures that I had created for the other models. After that it was time to work my way up the fuselage adding in random bits of machinery, piping, and other structures to give it a bit of surface character to match the other ships in the series.

For some of these bits, I reused some of the structures from the light cruiser and battleship models while for others, I just added things in that fit my fancy. In the end, the final model looked like this:

In the end, the model was 112.5 mm (4.4″) tall which put it right in the middle of the 94 mm and 120.75 mm heights of the light cruiser and battleship, respectively.

Printing

The next step was actually printing it. It’s all well and good to have a cool looking model, but if it doesn’t print, that doesn’t do us any good.

For this printing, I switched back to the grey resin that I had used for the light cruiser. It’s an opaque resin and takes about 50% longer to print but it photographs much better. The total print time with this resin was about 14 hours so I started the print before I went to bed and let it run overnight. When I got up in the morning the print was almost done. After it finished and I gave it some time to cure, I snapped a picture of the heavy cruiser model along with the light cruiser and battleship.

This shows the relative sizes along with a ruler for absolute scale. I think it turned out just fine and looks like a ship made from the same design templates.

Getting the Model and Miniature

I’ve added the Heavy Cruiser to the Miniature Price Table if you want to order a physical miniature. The cost for this miniature will be $5.50, the same as the sathar heavy cruiser. Anyone who joins my Patreon this month (Nov 2019) at the Crafter level will get a printed battleship and heavy cruiser miniature in December.

If you would like a copy of the model STL file, I’ve made the model available on DriveThruRPG along with all the other models. The cost of the UPF Heavy Cruiser model is $1.99. My Patreon backers received the model last week when I finished it.

Final Thoughts

What do you think about this model and miniature? Feel free to let me know in the comments below.

Next up is the UPF Assault Carrier. I’ve’ already started working on it so you can expect to see a post in December with that model and a printed version of the miniature.

I’m also considering making a chess set using the ships from both sides as the pieces. Is that something you would be interested in? Let me know.

UPF Battleship Model and Miniature

I thought I’d be done with this model and ready to post this last week, but the model ended up taking me about 50% longer than I had originally planned. And since I had guessed 10-12 hours, that was a significant time overrun. In the end, the model took about 17 hours to complete.

Click for full sized image

Let’s not bury the lede, here is the finished model, pictured to the right. With the engines, it stands 120.75mm (4.8″) tall (or long depending on how you look at it) and is a little less than an inch (23.7mm to be exact) in diameter at the widest point on the engines.

The extra time was spent in trying to get all the details just right. There are a lot of them on the battleship and it just took longer than I was expecting. However, I’m really happy with how it turned out. Let’s look a bit at the process.

Getting Started

This is a miniature that was part of the Federation Ships boxed produced by TSR. On the box, it said that there was “some assembly required” for the battleship miniature. This model comes in 10 different pieces. The eight engines are each separate and the main fuselage comes in two parts. Now, I picked up my miniature box(es, I have four now, only 2 of which didn’t have lead rot when I bought them) used on E-bay in the last few years. As such the previous owners had already glued the fuselage together in three of the boxes but hadn’t attached the engines. So this is what I had to start with.

One of the two originals I used to reference. The other had a paint primer coat applied. Click for full sized image.

Now, as I discovered while working on the Light Cruiser, those are the exact same engines on both miniatures, so I had already done the work to create them. I just had to make 8 copies for the battleship.

There were also a number of repeated elements on this ship, namely the three main levels of gun turrets, the structure around the waist of the ship, and the “grill” around the neck.

That’s what I tackled first. For the gun turrets, I created a model of each of the structures and then just placed four of each of them, ninety degrees apart, around the fuselage. For the structure around the waist, it was repeated six times, and the grill around the neck has thirteen bumps. That piece ended up being just a stretched and squished sphere rotated around the neck. Getting those pieces in place was the “easy” part and only took about five hours to do giving me a model that looked like this.

The gun turrets are the same as used in the Light Cruiser, but they are sitting on different base platforms. So while I could reuse the turret, I had to build the bases new for this miniature.

Adding the Trim

At that point I just started at the back of the ship and worked my way forward adding in all the little detail bits. When I got to the area between the gun emplacements, I would work one section at a time filling in the space between the turrets, rotating 90 degrees and repeating.

While there are some repeated elements across the ship and mostly on the bow or head of the vessel, almost all of the the little decorations on the surface are unique. So each one had to be measured with my calipers and reconstructed. In the end, that just wasn’t as fast (and there were a lot of details) as I had expected. When I hit the 12 hour mark, my original upper estimate, I was only up to the area between the upper guns and the model looked something like this. (I didn’t save an exact picture at the time.)

The details on the upper fuselage (right side in image) are only on the little bit you can see. Everything around the back side is still blank and the details between the gun turrets in the middle and bottom on this image are missing as well.

The one nice thing about filling in the details on the bow of the ship was that, unlike the light cruiser, which had irregular hexagons for the shape of the head, the battleship has a regular hexagon shape. That meant that the angles you had to tilt all the pieces were exactly the same on all the faces. That made lining things up much easier. Plus there are a number of repeated elements on the bow.

With that done, I added the cannon on the top and the model was finished. Here it is again in the same orientation as the previous two images.

Printing

As I learned from the light cruiser, these ships really need to be printed standing up. So that’s what I did. My biggest worry were the middle gun turrets. With the barrels facing down, each barrel was going to need it’s own support that would then need to be trimmed off. It turns out that those supports had to be added by hand as my printing software didn’t add them automatically.

click for full sized image

I had black resin in the printer at the time so that’s what I used to print this model. Unfortunately, the back resin doesn’t photograph as well as the green or grey. The image at the right shows the finished battleship model next to the Sathar Heavy Cruiser. Both still have their printing supports on. This was taken just after the battleship finished printing but I hadn’t cured it yet. The total print time was nearly 12 hours.

I also discovered after the fact that the vertical structures on back of the upper turrets that stick straight out need supports as well, which I didn’t add. They printed at an angle on the actual print. It looks fine, but isn’t what I had planned on.

I’m still amazed at the detail this printer can achieve. All of the details on the model show up in the print. Here the final printed miniature with all the supports removed.

click for full resolution

And here it is next to the original metal miniature (minus the engines).

You can probably spot a few differences and there are a few more visible if you’re holding them, but I’m really pleased with the way this turned out.

Getting the Model Files

I’ve already added the UPF Battleship to my Miniatures Price Table page here on the site if you’d like me to print you one or more of them.

Additionally, as I’ve been posting these models, people have asked me about getting the model files. To that end, over the last few week I’ve been publishing all the STL files for printing the models on DriveThruRPG. You can find them in the 3D Models section of my New Frontier Games storefront.

All of the models that are recreations of the original TSR miniatures are free, pay-what-you-want products. Any of the the models that are my original creations are listed with a small cost. I’ve posted all of the models I’ve created to date on the site with the exception of the UPF and sathar fighter models, and two models I’ve made based on deck plans created by Bill Logan. Those will be going up shortly, I just haven’t had a chance to get them posted. All future models will be posted there as well.

If you are one of my Patreon supporters at the Surveyor ($2/month) level or higher, I send you all the model files as I create them. Or you can support the creation of new models by becoming a patron or making a donation through the pay-what-you-want option on the models listed on DriveThru. And if you are a Patreon supporter at the Crafter Level ($30/month), I will send you a printed version of the miniature. Anyone who joins at that level this month will get the battleship mini.

What’s Next?

Now that the UPF Battleship is done, I’ve finished recreating all the UPF and sathar ships from the original boxed sets. I still need to do the pirate frigate, the freighter from the Federation Ships box, and the privateers to get all the original minis recreated.

I’ll tackle those, but first I want to fill in the order of battle for the two main sides in the Second Sathar War game so that people could potentially play out that game with a full compliment of miniatures. As such I still need to do the UPF Heavy Cruiser, the UPF Minelayer (if you don’t use the cutter miniature), the assault carriers for both sides. Of those the easiest will be the UPF Heavy Cruiser as it will draw heavily from the design of the light cruiser and battleship. I’ve already started working on that model. It might even be finished before the end of the month. It’s much easier to make my own designs than trying to recreate existing ones. Plus I have a lot of little details structures already designed from the other ships that I can reuse.

After the heavy cruiser, I’ll tackle the assault carriers and then the minelayer before going back to finish the recreations.

And that’s it for now. Let me know if you have any suggestions, questions, or comments in the comment section below. I hope you enjoy the miniatures as much as I enjoy making them.

UPF Destroyer Model and Ship Stands

This post is a couple of days late as I was traveling and completely forgot to get a post queued up for Tuesday.  And this is not what I had planned to post at all.  I had not planned to do another model post this month.  I was planning on putting together a table of all the star systems on the Extended Frontier Map to provide the spectral types of all the stars and notes about they systems. However, on my flight I had some time to kill and wasn’t completely decided on what I wanted to include in the table so I decided to do a bit of modeling.  I’ll probably finish up that table for next week.

The UPF Destroyer

Since I didn’t have my battleship mini or calipers with me, I couldn’t continue working on the battleship model. Instead, I thought I’d take a look at the UPF destroyer and start working on that.  Since there is no existing model for this ship, this would be a scratch build.  There are two references for this ship.  One in the Knight Hawks Campaign book on page 7 in the image showing the silhouettes of the various ships and the small game counters.

The silhouette images for both the frigate and destroyer are shown in the image to the right.  As you can see, the ships are fairly similar.  The destroyer is shown with a shorter engine block area, a longer neck, and an obvious gun on the bow.  The counters for the two ships are shown below.

These images also show a slightly smaller engine area and noticeable gun on the bow, but here the neck area is about the same and the main fuselage is longer.  Also, the width of the fuselage is a bit larger on the destroyer.  Since there is some detail on the body of the ships in the counters, you can notice that the main body of the destroyer is very similar to the body of the frigate, mainly that it has that same cross structure.

Since it’s always been in the back of my mind to make a set of models that match the silhouettes in the book in the future, I chose to take the counter as my guide for this project.  Especially since that meant that I could use a lot of the work done for  the frigate on the destroyer.

Building the Model

The frigate is a HS 5 ship while the destroyer is a HS 6 ship so we expect in the end the destroyer will be a little larger.  I started by pulling up the model for the frigate.  Since I’m using the original mini model as the basis, this model, like my recreation models, are not designed at an exact model scale but at their actual physical size.

Main Fuselage

I’m doing this design work in OpenSCAD which looks and acts very much like a programming language.  I give it positions, sizes, and rotations of various primitive shapes and it places them on the model.  I then “compile” it to get a render.  For example, this is the code that draws the main body of the frigate with its crossed block structure:

cylinder(r=3,h=15);

for(i=[0,90]){ rotate([0,0,i]){

  translate([0,0,2]) cube([11,2.9,4],center=true);

  translate([0,0,7.75]) cube([11,2.9,6.5],center=true);

  translate([0,0,4]) cube([10.5,2.5,1],center=true);

  translate([0,0,11]) scale([1,1,1.4]) rotate([0,45,0]) cube([7.77,2.9,7.77],center=true);

  translate([5.5,0,8]) sphere(r=1);

  translate([-5.5,0,8]) sphere(r=1);

}

Since I wanted that same block structure for the destroyer, just bigger, I just needed to increase the length and width of the blocks and shift the positions of some of them to make the body longer.  Basically, I just change a few numbers and re-render.  If I wanted to just make it bigger everywhere, I could wrap all of that in a scale() command and not change anything.  However, I wanted to keep the core diameter (that first cylinder) the same size so I modified each of the items.  Overall, I increased the length of this part of the ship by 2.6 mm and its width by 3 mm.

I kept the neck length nearly the same but stretched out the spherical section of the upper body by 0.3 mm (10%).

I also lengthened slightly the area behind the crossed block structure.  In the counter image, this is larger on the destroyer than the frigate and has a grilled structure, so I added in a hull section to match that image.  This also helped to lengthen the entire body of the ship.

The Bow

For the “head” or bow of the ship, I decided to just reuse wholesale the head of the frigate model.  I figure that since the ships are nearly the same size, the designers would just reuse an existing design to save on design and fabrication costs.  However, I did make one change.  On the frigate, the main gun extends out from the center of the head which means that the long lasing cavity of the laser cannon runs through the center of the bow taking up space inside the ship. 

In both destroyer images from the game, this laser cannon is very obviously mounted outside the ship and visible on the exterior.  So I added an externally mounted cannon on the model. This gives a bit more room inside the ship’s bow and helps to match the profile on the counter better.

Engines

According to the rules, both the frigate and the destroyer are supposed to have three Class B engines.  The original frigate mini just had a single engine mounted directly aft of the ship.  Since I’m building this model from scratch, I decided to give it the three engines it is supposed to have.

I started by shortening up the cylinder on the model that was the actual engine on the frigate model.  I effectively just chopped off the nozzle portion and added a small taper to the end.  On the destroyer, this is now part of the interior hull space instead of the engine itself.

Next, I created an engine model.  It’s roughly the same size as the engine from the frigate but I gave it my own set of surface details.  I added an engine strut and then put three of them on the model distributed symmetrically around the tail section of the ship.

Finishing Touches

Finally, I went back and added a bit of surface detail to the ship.  Some of the bits were also used on the frigate and some I added in just for the destroyer.  That gave me the finished model. 

The image on the left shows the destroyer model alongside the frigate model for a size and feature comparison.  The image on the right is the other side of the destroyer model so you can see the externally mounted laser cannon a little bit better. You can click on either image for a larger version.

All told, the destroyer is about 58mm long while the frigate is about 52mm.  I realized after the fact that since the silhouettes on the counters are constrained in size, the actual physical size of the destroyer might be a bit bigger than I made it but it’s distinctive enough that I’m not going to worry about it.  Also, I feel better about the engine area being bigger, not smaller, than on the frigate.  When I do my complete custom builds, they’ll all be to the same scale.

Printing

I got home from my trip yesterday and fired up my printer to try printing the model.  It worked out just fine with no issues.  The image below shows the printed destroyer alongside a printed frigate.

I decided to print the destroyer with the white resin which unfortunately doesn’t photograph well, so it’s kind of hard to see the details on it.  However, they are all there. 

Ship Stands

In discussions about the models on the Star Frontiers Facebook group, Jess Carver asked me about stands for the ships.  I hadn’t really thought about that yet but figured I’ve give it a go and see what I came up with.  I actually did this build a couple weeks ago before my trip.

Looking at the stands that came with the original minis, they were just X shaped and designed to fit in a 1” square.  And they came with a small, 2” long, 1/32” diameter steel rod to mount the mini on. 

If you’re playing on a 1” hex grid, that original model stand is going to be a bit big and extend out of the hex the ship is in.  This could be a problem if you have a bunch of ships close together.  If you’re playing off a grid, that’s not so much of a problem but you then need a protractor to measure turns and such.  I wanted to make a stand that solved both of those problems if possible.

I started by making the stand circular instead of square and 1” in diameter.  I asked around a bit about what size hexes people were using as I have actually never played with minis, just the original counters from the game.  The answers I got back were 1” and 1.5” so I went with the 1” option.  It’s easy enough to scale the model up to 1.5 inches if someone wants that sized base and a 1” base fits in a 1.5” hex but not the other way around.

The outer edge of the stand is slanted back toward the center and I put tick marks all around it at 15-degree intervals.  It took a couple of tries to get the sizing right on these so that they showed up well on the print.  The first tries were a little to small.  You could see them, but you had to get close and that defeated the purpose.  I made the 60-degree tick marks larger to help find them better and added a unique tick mark at one position to represent the “front” of the ship or the direction of travel.  Here’s an image of the model.

You’ll notice that it is just the base.  I made the decision to use a steel rod as the vertical piece instead of printing a vertical bar.  Printing it would require it to be a lot thicker and I didn’t want that.  Another thing that I discovered in printing the bases is that the hole in the middle that the rod is going to go into just doesn’t print well.  It keeps filling up with resin that would harden while printing.  I made the hole twice as large as the rod and it still didn’t work.  In the end I had to just drill out the hole for the rod.  Since I had to drill the models anyway, this wasn’t a big deal and probably better as the hole would be exactly the right size.  I did have to go buy a 1/32” drill bit since the smallest one I had at the time was 1/16”.

I was a little concerned about stability, at least when holding up the larger minis.  One inch is not that big when you compare it to a four- to six-inch miniature. So I gave it a stress test.  I grabbed one of my sathar heavy cruiser model, the largest one I’ve created at 5.5 inches, and mounted it on the stand.  I used one of the steel rods from my miniature boxed sets as I didn’t have any others.

It was surprisingly stable.  I gave it a tap and hit it harder than I intended.  The mini tilted by 10-15 degrees and then settled right back down on the base.  I deliberately tilted it in some different directions and it remained upright.  Obviously, you can tip it far enough that it falls over, but it seems to survive accidental bumping.  The plastic minis are much lighter than the metal ones so I’m sure that helps.  And if you want, you can always use two stands just like you had to do with the metal minis.

The only other issue was to find a source of steel rods.  I have the ones that came with my sathar and Federation ships boxed sets, but I am going to need more.  So I started looking around on-line.  I found some on Amazon that were 1.1mm in diameter (the ones from the boxed sets are 0.8mm) and 10cm long.  I wasn’t worried about length as I can cut them down to the 50mm size needed with my Dremel.  They were reasonably priced (20 for $8) but were shipping from Asia and would take a couple of weeks to arrive.  I kept looking.

I figured a hobby/craft store might have something I could use, especially if they sell model train supplies.  Sure enough, looking at Hobby Lobby’s on-line store they sold six 12” brass rods at 1/32” diameter for $4.  That was an even better price even including local sales tax. And I could just drive down and get them (about a 20-minute drive as the Hobby Lobby is a couple towns away up the freeway).  It took me a couple days to get over there but when I did, I found that not only did they have the brass rods I was expecting, they sold a four-pack of 12” steel rods for just $2.  An even better price.  So I bought a pack, went home, chopped up one with my Dremel, printed up a bunch of stands, and mounted up examples of some of my models.

I’m starting to get the itch to print out enough of these and run a big battle on my kitchen table.

Final Thoughts

The build of the destroyer went really fast, at least partially because I was reusing the basic design of the frigate.  I completed it in just about four hours.  For comparison, the light cruiser model took something between 8-12 hours (I wasn’t really tracking it at the time) and I’ve spent 6 hours on the battleship and probably have another 6-10 to go.  Similarly, the stand build was really quick, maybe a half hour as it was a really simple construction and had minimal details.

The recreation models take a long time as I’m constantly measuring, placing, remeasuring, and tweaking the features of the model to try to match the original as closely as possible.  With a custom build, I don’t have that constraint and can just build the model as I wish so it can go faster.

This was a fun build and fills in a gap in the order of battle for the UPF.  Once I finish the battleship, the only remaining models will be the UPF heavy cruiser and assault carriers for both the UPF and sathar.  Since the miniature labeled as the sathar cutter on the blister packs matches the silhouette of the UPF minelayer on the counter, and I’ve already done that model, that ship can be used as the UPF minelayer if desired.  However, that ship definitely looks more like a sathar vessel so I’ll design a new minelayer for the UPF as well.

I’ve added the destroyer model and the stands to my price list on the Order Miniatures page.  Anyone that joins my Patreon as a supporter at the Crafter level will get all the models I’ve done this month (space station, light cruiser, destroyer, and a set of stands) mailed out to them in November.

Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below.

UPF Light Cruiser Model and Miniature

I didn’t think I would have this done by today but in a burst of fevered work, I finished up the light cruiser model so that’s what I’m writing about today. The image to the right shows the final model (click for the full-sized image). Let’s talk a bit about the ship.

First off, I’ve been calling this the light cruiser but on the Federation Ships boxed set of miniatures that the original came in, it is labeled as a Destroyer. However, it’s much too big to be a destroyer so I’ve always considered it a light cruiser, although it could arguably be a heavy cruiser also.

The frigate model is 2.25 inches long. Based on the size given for the frigate in the rules, this makes the model 1/2500th scale. The destroyer is only 30% longer and so at that scale should be about 2.9 inches long. This model is 3.75″ long. As a light cruiser it is a 1/3800th scale model which makes a little more sense to me. The battleship model is at 1/5900th scale so that would put it in between the scales of the frigate and the battleship and similar to the sathar light cruiser model which is at 1/3500th scale.

Here’s a picture of the two original miniatures side by side. They are roughly the same size (when I’m comparing them and quoting scales, I’m looking only at the fuselages and not counting the engines) and have basically the same volumes. So you’d expect the ships to be of similar sizes as well. So that’s why I’ve been calling this the light cruiser and not the destroyer despite what the box says.

With that out of the way, let’s look at creating the model.

The Fuselage

The first step was to build the basic fuselage that all the other bits would be attached to. This was fairly straight forward as it was mostly just some cylinders and cones hooked together. The calipers provided the lengths and diameters and that got us from the stern up to the neck just before the bow.

This is where I made my first deviation from the original miniature. On the mini, the bow is a hexagon from back to front so it extends out beyond the neck portion of the ship just a little on the sides. I decided to make if flush there and so used the software to smoothly transition from the circular neck to the hexagon, just like I had done on the frigate model.

At this point, I also added all the ridged trim to the edges of the model. I ended up making my trim a little more finely grooved than in the original miniatures. With that done, I had the basic fuselage and could start adding details.

The Engines

As you can see from the photo above, the engine structure on the UPF ship is much more complicated than the sathar one. That was part of the reason I started with the sathar ships several years ago when I first started making the reproduction models – it was simpler. However, I knew I was going to have to tackle this.

Then I got looking at the engines for the battleship model as well (they are not attached to the model like they are for the light cruiser). On closer inspection, I realized that they were exactly the same! Which meant that once I created a model of the engine, I could use it for the battleship as well.

So I busted out my calipers and started measuring. I quickly realized that that wasn’t going to work too well as there were little bits and pieces that I couldn’t reach with my calipers to make measurements. So I also took a series of images of the engines from each side that I could pull up in a graphics program and measure the number of pixels across a given feature was and convert that to millimeters to use in making the model. The result was the model to the right.

If you look closely, it’s a little bit cleaner than that one on the model. That’s because I’ll be 3D printing these and don’t have to pour molten lead into a mold. That allows me to leave of features that on the miniature look like they are there just to get the lead to flow into all the right parts. So it’s not an exact replica, but rather a close match.

The Guns

The next bit was to do the gun turrets. They are all the same and not quite equally spaced around the body. This was another instance of being able to make a single model and reuse it. It was also at this point that I discovered that there are two slightly different versions of the light cruiser miniatures.

Over the years I have acquired four different Federation Ships boxed sets, primarily in an attempt to get one that didn’t suffer from lead rot. It seems that these ships were particularly succeptable to that, primarily the battleship model. I finally ended up with two good sets, one of which had a coat of primer applied. In looking at the light cruiser models from these two sets, I noticed that the gun turrets were different between the two. On of the minis (the painted one) had more details on the turret than the other. I pulled out my other two cruiser minis to check and there was one of each in that pair as well. The difference is minor but I chose to model the more detailed version.

Again, like the engine, there were some features, mainly material supporting the gun turrets, that were there to help the lead flow into the mold that I left off in my model.

Details, Details, Details

With the easy and repeatable parts out of the way, it was time to start adding in the individual details all along the surface of the ship. I simply started at the stern of the ship and worked my way forward using calipers, rulers, and my good, old-fashioned Mark I eyeball (assisted by a magnifying glass) to determine the size and position of each of the features on the model.

The boxes, cylinders, and spheres were easy enough to add in as those are native shapes the modeling software I use produces. The really tricky part was all the piping along the body of the ship. Getting those shapes created and positions was a bit trick but by the time I got to the bow of the ship I was getting pretty good at the process and had built up some tools that simplified it that will help me in models going forward.

And then it was done. I wasn’t keeping exact track of the time but I think I spent something on the order of 10-20 hours producing the model. Now it was time to print.

Printing

If you remember from my review of the AnyCubic Photon printer, the print time is directly related to the height of the object printed. Since this model was small enough that it could lay flat on my print bed, I had two choices, flat or vertical. I was going to print this with the grey, opaque resin because I wanted to get more familiar with that resin and because it makes the details a little easier to see. The opaque resin takes longer to print and cure as you have to spend a little more time on each layer when printing (16 instead of 10 seconds). So printing flat meant a 3 and a quarter hour print while a vertical print meant a 12 hour print. In the interest of testing, I went with the shorter print (I really wanted to see a print that day and not wait all night).

Once the print was done and cured, I started looking it over to see how it compared to the original miniature. The “down” side looked fine, there were some variations but overall it looked fine. Then I turned it over. The “up” side did not look nearly as good and felt almost melted to me. I realized that this was from resin pooling on the upper surfaces and not draining off and then slowly curing during the printing process. I also noticed some warping due to not having enough supports in certain places. It looked like a flat print was not going to work. So I set one up to print overnight in the vertical orientation.

click for full resolution image

This first image shows the three minis side by side. The original metal miniature is in the middle (this is the primed one). On the left is the vertically printed mini and on the right is the horizontally printed one. This is the “down” side of the horizontally printed mini. Comparing the two printed minis, they look about the same on this side. Although I think the vertically printed one is just a little crisper.

Comparing the plastic and metal minis, I realized that despite always reducing the size of the features as I measured them off the unpainted mini, a lot of the features came out slightly larger. Also, the metal miniature still wins on the details in some places. I think I could fix that but I’m happy with the way it looks.

Turning the model over we get this view.

click for full resolution image

Here you can immediately see the issue with the printing on the horizontally printed model (on the right). The features are just not as crisp and clean. As I said before, to me it looked a bit melted. You can’t really see it in these images but the bow and ends of the engines are pinched and skinnier than the other model and the original. This is due to flexure in the printing process that could probably be fixed with more supports (I don’t think there were supports on the very tips because they were higher up and therefore didn’t technically need them). However, the issues with the remainder of the surface make this not really worth pursuing. This model will need to be printed vertically for best results.

Here’s another picture of the first side with the models in a slightly different orientation that includes a ruler for scale.

In this view, you can actually see a bit of the curvature I was talking about in the bow and engines of the model on the right.

Wondering if the opaque resin was part of the problem of the parts looking bigger or less distinct (due to the longer curing time while printing) I printed another vertically-oriented one win the translucent green resin that I did a lot of the other ships in. I don’t have a picture but I decided that there really wasn’t any difference between the two other than it was harder to see the details on the green one.

Final Thoughts

This model is good to go. I could tweak it in the future to make it look a little bit more like the original miniature but I’m happy with it the way it is so if I do tweak it, it will be some time in the future when I’ve got the rest of the line of ships complete.

I’ll be sending the model file out to my Patreon supporters later today. I’ve added this model to the price list on the Order Miniatures page for those that want to order minis for their collection. It’s priced just like the Sathar light cruiser at $2.75.

Some time in the next month (probably after we get issue 26 of the Frontier Explorer out the door), I’m going to start posting the model files up on DriveThruRPG for download as well. The models that are reproductions will be offered as pay-what-you-want while the ones that are original to me will have a small cost.

Next up is the UPF battleship. I already have the gun turrets (but not the bases, those are different) and the engines ready to go. There are a lot of repeated features on that model so it might go faster but it will definitely be November before it’s done. After that, I plan on filling in the gaps in the ship lines by designing a UPF destroyer, minelayer, and heavy cruiser, and then the assault carriers for the UPF and sathar. That will give all the ships necessary for full fleet engagements. After that I’m going to go back and tackle the pirate frigate, freighter, and privateer minis from the original sets to complete all the reproductions. There might be some new ships thrown in along the way as well.

Feel free to share your thoughts and comments below.

Armed Station Model and Miniature

I teased this model in the last State of the Frontier post where I showed a picture of the printed miniature. In this post, I’ll talk about the creation of the Armed Station model and miniature that I created as part of my current interest in doing more 3D modelling.

Scale and Sizes

The basic outline of this model is based on the space station counter that came with the Knight Hawks boxed set, pictured to the right. For scale, I assumed this to be a HS 6 station making the diameter of the station 1200 meters, just short of a mile. In the end, the model was a bit bigger than that as I set the diameter of the center of the ring to be 1200 meters but that’s a minor quibble that can be fixed if really wanted by scaling the final model.

When I do my modeling, I typically work at 1/1000 scale in the model files so 1 meter on the actual vessel is represented as 1 mm in the model. However, for the space station, that was just a little bit too bit so instead I worked at 1/10,000th scale or 1mm = 10 meters. In the end, at that scale, the model came out at 137.4mm across, or 5.4″.

With the outer ring having a diameter of 1200 meters, that gives us some dimensions of other parts of the structure using the counter image as a silhouette.

The Main Ring

First is the cross sectional size of the ring itself. I chose to model the ring, at least for this version of the model with a circular cross section. I may do a future one with a square or rectangular cross section. Regardless, at this scale, that give the ring a height of 100 meters in the radial direction. So for the model, it has a diameter of 100 meters

That means, assuming you have 5m per deck, you could put 20 separate decks in the ring of the station, with the widest deck at the center being about 100m wide and the decks getting narrower as you move up or down from the center. The upper (and lower) two or three decks would be fairly narrow and probably used for machinery and other non-public areas.

The Spokes

On this station, the spokes connecting the hub to the ring are 60 meters across. Again, I chose to use a circular cross section so they are 60 meters in diameter.

In addition to the spokes of the station, the counter shows a thicker “sheath” around the ring where the spokes meet it. This sheath is 164 meters in diameter compared to the 100 meters of the ring. That means that there can be an additional 12 decks in this section of the station.

The Hub

Let’s start with what we can see from the picture on the counter. Measuring this out, the hub is 400 meters in diameter. That is the same size as the outer diameter on a hull size 2 station! But that’s fine. This is a big station and is supposed to be able to dock a lot of ships of all sizes.

That brings us to the first constraint. According the Star Frontiers rules, a hull size 6 station can dock any sized ship, including the HS 20 ships. Those ships are 100m in diameter. So the bay opening into the hub has to be at least that big. As drawn, in the counter, it’s only 85 meters wide so we’ll have to make it a little wider but that’s not that big of an issue. I ended up modeling it 110 meters wide. A HS 20 ship will fit, but it will be tight.

The harder part is the length of the hub. Those same HS 20 ships are 600 meters long. Or equal in length to the radius of the entire station. For our hub to be able to house those ships inside as the game implies, means that the hub has to be really long, at least 650 meters (to handle variations in width/length both the door and length should probably be larger but that’s what we’re going with here.) This results in a station that looks like this.

I tossed in some HS 18 Sathar heavy cruisers for scale. There’s also a HS 6 freigher (the CDCSS Nightwind) there to the right of the hub.

The same is true for the smaller stations. This image is one I made a long time ago of a HS 1 station which is just 200m in diameter and supposed to be able to house up the HS 6 ship. This shows a cut away of the hub with the CDCSS Nightwind inside along with a couple of assault scouts. I didn’t put bay doors on this one, as it was just for scale comparisons.

Personally, I don’t like the hub that big and in my game, the bigger ships don’t dock inside the hub. Rather they just enter a nearby parking orbit and material and people are moved across by shuttles, which can dock in the hub. So for the final version of this model, I made the hub just 200m tall instead of 650m. That’s still big enough to dock up to a HS 8 ship inside. In a future version, I might make it a little bigger, at 250-260m allowing a HS 10 ship to dock inside. But anything else starts to look a bit to big.

Finishing up the Model

Once I’d decided on the size of the hub, the basic shape of the station was done, but it was pretty boring looking. So I decided to add a bit of surface detail to the model to make it a little more visually appealing.

First I created bay doors that I could position either open or closed. In the end I decided to print the model with them closed but I created models with them both open and closed.

Then I added some surface detail all around the ring, spokes, and hub to give it a little character. In the end, the final model looked like this.

The asymmetry in the number of pips to the left and right of the doors was accidental. But I decided to leave them. The V-shape and half moon shape above and below the bay doors where intentional as navigational markers. The side with the ‘V’ that touches the bay entry is the “up” direction to orient ships aligning with the bay for entry. the opposite side of the hub is identical.

Printing the Model

As I said earlier, the completed model, at 1/10,000th scale is 137.4 mm. The problem is my high resolution printer has a maximum width of 120 mm. So this is just a bit too big. It’s not too tall, the limit there is 155 mm. And it’s not too thick as it can be 68 mm wide and this model is only 22mm wide (that would have been a bigger issue if I’d gone with the fat hub). I could easily print it on my big printer; in fact, I could print it at 1/5000th scale if I wanted to) but that wasn’t the plan. I wanted to print it on the SLA printer. If I rotate it just right, the software says it is possible to print the station at 1/10,000 scale in the build volume I have. And I might try that one day

However, from the beginning I had planned to print it at 1/20,000th scale which makes the largest dimension just 68.7 mm or 2.7″. So that’s what I did. You can see the result in this image.

The station was printed with black resin, the assault scout is 1″ tall and printed in the green resin that came with the printer.

The only detail that doesn’t show up is the “X” on the bay door. They are there, but very, very faint. I might go back and thicken them up in the future so they show up better on the print.

Final Thoughts

Given the size of the station, if it is spinning such that the deck at the center of the ring has a gravity of 1.0g, then for every 60m you move toward or away from the center of the station, you gravity will change by 0.1g. This means that the upper deck, 45m above that position will have a gravity of 0.925g while the outer deck will have a gravity of 1.075g. In the part of the station where the spokes connect, assuming there are decks all the way out to the edge, you get a range from .87g to 1.13g. And the hub with a radius of 200m, has a gravity of 0.33g, roughly the equivalent of the surface of Mars.

That raises an interesting point. The docking area in the hub is supposed to be fairly low gravity. I wouldn’t consider 0.33g to be that low so the hub is probably a bit too large in diameter. But it looks cool so it’s fine for the model.

The model has already gone out to my Patreon supporters at the Surveyor ($2/month) or higher. If you join at that level you’ll get access to it as well. Anyone that joins at the Crafter level ($30/month) in the month of October will get a printed version of the model as well as 8 UPF and 8 Sathar fighters. I’m also planning on posting the UPF Light Cruiser this month (the model is almost done) so a printed mini of that model will go out to backers at that level as well. Those will all be printed and shipped out in early November.

If you don’t want to back the Patreon, but still would like to get a print of any of the miniature models I’ve created, you can jump over to the “Order Miniatures” page to see the costs for the minis and place an order.

Let me know your thoughts and comments on the Armed Station model and miniature in the comment section below.

Fighter Miniatures

I’ve been bitten by the 3D modeling bug again. It started with me creating this page here on the site. I figured that since I had my high resolution 3D printer and a bunch of 3D models I had already made, I could offer the opportunity to print them for those that wanted them.

So after creating the page, I posted a link to in in the Star Frontiers Facebook group and got quite a number of comments. One from Andy Campbell, which suggested that I make “scenario packs” – basically providing all the minis needed for a given module or scenario from the rules, was very close to something I had noodling around in the back of my head already. The problem was, I only really had the sathar ships and a few of the smaller UPF and pirate vessels like the the Assault Scouts, UPF Frigate, and Corvette.

Plus there are a number of ship designs for which no official miniature was ever released such as the fighters, the UPF Destroyer and Heavy Cruiser, and assault carriers for both sides. There’s no official Sathar Destroyer either but I’ve already made that one. I’d need to make models for those missing ship types if I was going to to pull this off.

Now, I already had plans to create the Sathar Assault Carrier. It was one of my original project when I started this blog. So I think I’ll be getting back to that one shortly. However, to get started I wanted to start on something small, and something there were some art references for. I also wanted to test out how small of a miniature I could reasonably do with my printer.

I had a Sathar Fighter model that I had created several years ago but it was based on a fan created fighter drawing and had just a bit too much resemblance the the rebel logo from Star Wars. I had also played around a while back with the idea of making 3D counters, basically versions of the ship counters that came with the Knight Hawks game but with raised reliefs of the ships on them instead of just being flat. I had made one of the UPF Fighter so I had some experience modelling that one. So that’s where I decided to start.

UPF Fighter

I made this model based on the image on the counter that came with the game. It has a short stubby rudder and is somewhat atmospheric capable. I didn’t put any detailing on the engine package at the back as shown on the counter but I might go back and do that at some point. However, it’s really small so the detail would be mostly lost anyway in a physical miniature.

I do all my ship modelling at 1/1000 scale so that 1mm on the model equals a meter on the actual ship. Since according to the rules, the fighter is a hull size 1 ship, that means it is only 10m long. The ship ended up being 11m in size as I gave the 10m size to the fuselage and tacked on an extra meter for the engine nozzle at the back.

This model was printed at full size (1/1000th scale). That means that the printed miniature is only 11m long and about the same wide. For the capital ships, I typically print them at 1/3000th scale as that is roughly the scale of the officially release miniatures. However, printing these fighters at that scale would make them absolutely minuscule. It also wouldn’t have printed properly as the wings would have been too thin. As is, they are just a bit larger than the thinnest piece I can print with this printer. This is a little, tiny model and you have to be careful because if you’re not careful, it might just blow away. This is now my UPF Figher MK I miniature.

That one worked. And it only took me about 3 hours to make the model. What’s next?

Sathar Fighter

As I said earlier, I have a model of a sathar fighter that I created based on a fan image (the model and image that inspired it is to the right). This one was designed to be printable on a FDM style printer with 0.1mm layer resolution and it works. But it is a very simple model. And I had always called this my Sathar Fighter MK II model as I knew this shouldn’t be the original. What I wanted was one that matched the silhouette on the counter that came with the game.

For this fighter model, in addition to the game counter (at left), there is this great illustration from page 54 of the Knight Hawks Campaign Book showing this same fighter being pursued by another fighter. So we have some more detail to go on for this one.

This model was going to take some more work. With the bent wings and contoured surface, on the cockpit disk and the wings themselves the modelling was going to be a little more complicated.

Again I went with a 10m length, this time including the engine nozzle in that 10m. Since I’m still modelling in OpenSCAD, I started creating little modules that will allow me to reuse some of the elements I created along the way in other ships if I need them.

This model took me a bit longer. I was getting back into the groove of modeling and so getting faster, but this one was a bit more complicated. In the end, this model took me about four hours to finish but I really like the way it turned out. Here is a couple of view of the model, plus the printed version side-by-side with the UPF fighter.

You can’t see it in the picture, but that detail that I added on the back of the fuselage is just sort-of visible on the printed model. Which means I should go back and add some detail to the UPF fighter as well. As it currently stands, this model is only printable on my SLA printer as the wings are almost exactly one resolution element (0.05mm) thick. In fact, I wasn’t sure it was going to print and was relieved to see that it did. I will probably go back at some point and make the wings a little thicker. If or no other reason, to make them a little stronger.

Compared to other ships

Here’s another comparison image showing the two fighters next to a small assault scout mini (my Swift-class assault scout model printed at 1/2000 scale), and a replica of the officially released UPF frigate mini which is also happens to be at nearly 1/2000th scale. So the two larger ships are roughly to scale with each other but the fighters should be half again as small to be on the same scale.

Future Models

At the very least, I want to make a second UPF Fighter (Mk II) mini that matches the ship depicted chasing the sathar fighter in the image above. There are also some other fighter-like ships depicted throughout the illustrations in the rules that I might take a crack at.

Also, if you are at all familiar with the rules, you know that these fighters as depicted could not possibly match the stats given for them in the game. These fighters are supposed to be packing three assault rockets, each of which is roughly the same size as the fighter’s entire fuselage. One of these days I’ll make a model that depicts that.

But first, I want to start seriously looking at finishing off the line of ships so I have a model of each ship type. I’m also going to need some space stations. As I’m writing this, I’ve already made my first space station model. I’ll post about that here in the future but if you are following me on Twitter or are a member of the Facebook group, you’ve already seen some pictures of that model.

Getting the models and minis

My Patreon supporters at the Surveyor ($2/month) or higher level will be getting copies of the model files for each of these models (and all future models as well). If you’d like to get them as they are produced, consider signing up to support this work. In the very near future, I’ll also be putting all my model files on-line, probably on DriveThruRPG for everyone to access.

If you’d like to get 3D printed miniatures of any of the models I’ve created, you can check out my Order Miniatures page which gives the details on how to order them and lists the prices.

Ship Dock – Crew Lounge Area

This is a common dock lounge found on most large (HS 5 or 6) civilian stations around the Frontier.  Located in the station hub, the gravity here is only about 0.1g. Just enough to keep you in your seat but light enough that you have to be careful with your movements.

This lounge area provides a place for crews to get off the ship without going into the station proper, mingle with crews in adjacent berths, and even conduct some semi-private business away from the hustle and bustle of the main station.

Each docking hub can accommodate up to four ships so there could be members of different crews here at any given time but no more than four at once. Depending on the size of the station and its central hub, there could be from 4 to 16 of these areas on any given station.

The Map

Click for the full resolution (50px per square/meter) image.

I’ve had this map kicking around in my sketch book for years. It’s actually part of a one-shot adventure I’ve run and will write up some day. This weekend I decided to give it the full, vector-graphic treatment and turn it into a usable map. I’ve used this location in a couple of different adventures over the years and it’s part of my concept of the design of the stations around the Frontier.

The map above is the labeled version at my standard 100 dpi resolution with each square representing 1 meter. If you want an unlabeled version, or either version at 70 pixels per square which is the default for Roll20’s map system, here are a few more versions of the map. The ones labeled 70ppm (pixels per meter) are the larger versions for VTT systems.

ShipDock-noLabelsDownload
ShipDock-70ppmDownload
ShipDock-noLabels-70ppmDownload

If your particular virtual table top uses a different default resolution, let me know and I’ll add in maps at that resolution as well.

Area Descriptions

Area 1 – Station Passageway

This is the main passageway through the hub of the station. I’ve drawn it here as a 2m wide passage with a small side passage going to the crew lounge. That’s how I originally drew it and described it the first time I used it. When I used it in the “A New Can of Worms” game, the hub corridor was much wider, like the terminal area in modern airports, and the crew lounge area was right up against it with glass walls. The PCs in that game tried several times, unsuccessfully, to get in.

Area 2 – Crew Lounge

This is the crew lounge proper. It has a couple of desks, some tables and chairs and a sofa and a couple of recliners. All in all, it’s a bit over 45 feet long and 20 feet wide.

The desks are fixed in the corners but all the other furniture is movable and can be positioned wherever the crews want. There are sensors that monitor the area in front of the doors and if they are blocked, the lights in the room flash and an alarm sounds until the offending item is moved. Since there is only 0.1g in the area, it’s fairly easy to move even the sofa but everything stays on the floor and doesn’t float around.

The door into the room from the hallway is locked with a level 4 security lock that opens only to beings who have been registered with the station as part of the crew of one of the ships assigned to these berths. The registration is typically done as part of the docking procedure so that the doors are working as soon as they arrive. The door itself is a pressure door and takes 3 turns (18 seconds) to cycle and move through: On the first turn the person wishing to pass through stops at the door and starts the process, on the second, the doors cycles and opens, and on the third, they can move through into the room. The door closes and seals automatically if not held open.

The roof of the room is a series of large windows, allowing those in the room to look up and out into the central hub of the station and see their ship and the other ships docked in the area. The ships attached to passages 4b & 4c are directly above the room while the other two are slightly higher up and off to the left and right.

Area 3 – Access Halls

These short passages provide access to the docking tunnels on either side of the crew lounge area. Like the door into area 2, these pressure doors have a level 4 lock on them that only allows the registered crews of the two ships docked off of the passageway through. Thus the crew of the ship docked in passage 4a could not open the door to 3b.

Area 4 -Docking Tunnels

Each of these passages ends at another pressure door (not shown) that opens into the docking collar connecting one of the ship’s airlocks to the station. For small ships this may be the only airlock and so all crew and passengers come out this way. On larger ships with more than one airlock, this is connected to the crew’s airlock with passengers typically going through a different part of the station. Alternately, for large ships, more than one of these docking tunnels may be connected to different airlocks on the same ship.

The tunnels move away from the lounge area, angling upward as they do, and then turn into a vertical shaft going up to the ship with ladders and hand holds along the walls. Gravity decreases from 0.1g to less than 0.05g by the time you reach any of the ships.

Tunnels 4b and 4c typically connect to smaller ships (up to hull sizes 8 and 6 respectively) although a single large ship could be connected to both of them. The other two tunnels extend farther out into the hub and can accommodate ships up to hull size 10 (4a) and 12 (4d). Even larger ships could take up 4a and 4b or 4c and 4d together or even three or all four of the tunnels (for a HS 20 ship).

The pressure doors to these docking tunnels are keyed only to the crew of the ship docked to that tunnel and use a level 6 security lock.

Some Thoughts on Station Sizes

The 0.1g gravity in this area only really works if you don’t allow very large ships into the station hub. That limitation goes a bit against the Star Frontiers setting as described in the rule books. There it says that a HS 6 station is 1200m in diameter. Assuming 1 g at the rim, that mean you hit 0.1g of gravity at just 60m from the center of the station. So the hub can only be 120m in diameter. The size given for a HS 20 ship is 100m in diameter so it could just squeeze in but would take up all the space. So you either have to limit the size of ships that can come in, or you have to make the hub bigger which means the gravity would be a bit higher in the lounge area probably up to 0.2g. It’s even worse on smaller stations. Because they are smaller, you hit that 0.1g even closer to the center of the station. Just something to keep in mind.