74 Black Star Fleet

Build 16/1-3/3 2007 (24/2 Micro Railgun Corvette, 2/3 Bording Craft, 3/3 Fighter and Gunship)

Contest entry

I originally build this little flotilla for Nightowls Microscale Fleet-contest. With a little extension, I actually managed to photograph the fleet - Finished last in the competition and got a nice box of random old lego.

Obviously very much inspired by one of the cool capital ships from the Star Wars Flight Simulators (from TIE-fighter onwards), the Strike Cruiser.

The core is made with the bracket-box-technique as explained by... in this thread.

The turrets here are obviously inspired by boxy Star Wars turbolaser-turrets, but besides that, this craft wasn't inspired by anything in particular and one of my absolute favorites of the fleet.

The smaller crafts in the fleet are all based on various applications of the 1x1 brick with 5 studs (travis brick).

Obviously very much inspired by my Z-Fighter 2.

Sometimes, everything just slots together perfectly.

Made the same day as the Railgun Corvette, the Boarding Craft the most unspired part of the flotilla.

But you have to have crafts to take over enemy ships or ferry persons and cargo between ships.

Part of the contest was to create an interiour for the fleet.

Having no larger ships, I made a section of a Hangar-Ship with this little repair section.

Exteriour shots of fighters hanging by their perches in the pictures below.

All the crafts in the BSF are made in 1 plate = 1 minifig-scale (1pM).

Translated to minifig scale (16x), this would make the

• Corvette 330 studs long,
• Boarding craft: 184 studs
• Gunship: 176 studs
• Figther 112 studs (actually, the scale of the fighters should probably be considered 2 or 3pM, because the cockpit glass is twice as the bridges on the other crafts)

In the image on the right you can see the Railgun Corvette together with a 3pM-sized version of the crew-compartment behind the bridge. In the pictures below you can see these two versions together with a 16x minifig-sized version of the crew-compartment.

At couple of months later, in june 2007, we had a discussion about how to make a good space station standard, and I suggested a ring-shaped microscale one.

Having no other microscale crafts than the BSF, it was natural to use these to illustrate my point.some point we had aJust sketching out a spacebase standard that could be used for public displays:

Each of the 16 sections is 16 studs wide (excluding the hinges) resulting in a ring-diameter of ca 85 studs.

An old wish of mine is to create a nice spacy background for all my models, but lacking time and proper capital ships for backdrop, this has never really been possible.

With the BSF, however, I suddenly found myself in posession of decent capital ships, and during the summer holiday of 2007 I set up a little scene with MLCad and POV-Ray.

In order to increase interest photoshopping space-scenes among lego space designers (and get some inspiration myself), I decided to share the basic picture so that anyone could have a try.

With 12 different versions from 10 different people, this challenge was a raving succes: You can read more and see all the cool images here.

-

The fleet was temporarily announced in this thread on CSF and with a limited number of pictures on Flickr.