The mini fleet

Fellow Citizen,

the following pictures are a response to the annual IAE aftermath on the concierge forums. Most citizen show their proud fleet with FleetViewer (https://www.starship42.com/fleetview/). But i wanted to take it a step further and created my own mini fleet over the last couple of weeks. My latest 3D printer, an Anycubic Mono, provides unparalleled details on small prints. So i decided to go for a 1:2000 scale.

The largest ship i own is the Orion, which has (currently) a lenght of 340m. In scale 1:2000 this would be 170mm. Sadly my smallest vehicle is only 3m, the Greycat PVT - if i would use the same scale - the figure size would only be around 1,5mm. Therefor i scaled the models down in different categories (see scale picture) so they are at least 20mm big.

Another hurdle using this size were the available 3D models (from holoviewer). They are not clean enought for this grade of detail. The slicer program, which is used to prepare the 3D print, wasnt able to handle them. So i had to edit and clean up every single one, some of them were even remodelled (see pictures).

If you are not familiar with 3D printing, the resin printer (SLA) i used prints from top down with help of liquid resin and uv light. To avoid artefacts and missprints, i had to do some extra steps to get clean print results (something which you normally dont experience with common FDM printers).

In case someone wants to do something similar – here are the steps i did:

recalculate normals triangulate faces cleanup loose verticles and faces decimate geometry by 0.5 degenerate dissolve cleanup isolated verticles and edges tessellate dissorted faces save and export

verify SLT -> MS 3D Builder -> export Chitubox -> add supports -> export verify supported SLT -> MS 3D Builder -> export Photon Workshop Slicer -> slice -> print

I printed in 5 batches with a total printtime of ~25 hours. The 1:2000 scale models have a layer thickness of 0.05mm all others are printed at 0.02mm. Preparing the 3D modells, printing, priming, coloring/painting and creating all the images took about 3 weeks. (i started right after the IAE).

After printing and cleaning, i primed all models with black and a second time in the base color of the ship using airbrush. Then i painted all models by hand. Keep in mind, most models have a size of approximately 20mm (or a Cent coin as comparison), so i used very thin brushes and alot of patience ;) (some colors are a free interpretation, since not all ships have a good reference / artwork)

You can see all steps in the following pictures and gifs. Feel free to ask if you are interested in something about this project.

I hope you enjoy the results as much as i did enjoy the whole creation process!

See you in the verse!

TheOrigin