 February 20, 2014 - 6:18pm |  So I'm building a 3-D model of the sathar destroyer that I did the write-up on. Here's the premliminary model with the basic shape plus the shuttles around the center section and the laser cannon sticking out the nose.I'm working on adding in details now. I'm planning on adding in outlines of the airlocks and hatches as well as detailing on the engines and the weapons. I'll post updates as I get them finished. The end goal is to take this to the library at the university which has a 3D printer that I can print off miniatures on. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 February 20, 2014 - 6:44pm | What are you drawing this in (software package)? -iggy |
February 20, 2014 - 7:27pm | OpenSCAD - it's basically a CAD program that you use programming constructs to build your model. Basically you create shapes, tell them how to be rotated and where to shift to. Plus you can join them or have them subtract from one another. The code to generate that model as shown is 31 lines long, 8 of which just consist of a closing curly brace '}'. The main body is actually a curve that I exported from my silhoette drawing of the deck plans. I created the curve in Inkscape and exported into a file format that OpenSCAD could read and then created a rotational solid out of it. I then added the neck and the balls at the end, created an engine and then replicated it 4 times (with a for loop), cut out the circles around the shuttles and added the tail of the shuttles in. Plus added the laser cannon. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
February 21, 2014 - 6:37pm |  Okay, here is the finished model. It's kind of hard to see but I added in all the bay doors, air locks, and weapons. Plus I added a little detail to the engines to make them look more like the ones in the offical miniatures. I'll be dropping of the model files at the 3D printer hopefully tonight so I should have the prototypes early next week.It took a lot more work to get all the details on than it did to get the basic body shape. The good old 80/20 rule at work. It will be interesting to see how it prints out or if I have too fine of detail. I'll be printing 2 models, one at 0.1mm resolution and one at 0.2mm resolution. It will probably take the former (which is slower and more expensive) to get the details. The printed model will be 58mm long. The frigate from the original minis is 52mm long and flattened. I think this will be about the right size to got with those figures. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 February 21, 2014 - 8:01pm | Damn, those rigid polygons make my nipples hard!  |
 February 22, 2014 - 9:13pm | I like the texture on that hull. |
February 22, 2014 - 9:57pm | Actually, the texture on the second image is just the polygons used to created the model. I didn't set it to as fine a detail because I was tired of 45 minute renders taking up 2.5 GB of RAM on my computer.  Also I scaled the image down by a factor of 10 so the surfaces are more noticable.Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 February 24, 2014 - 12:35pm | Damn, those rigid polygons make my nipples hard!
LOL ----------------------------------------------- |
June 5, 2014 - 12:29pm |  So I finally got a 3D print of this model. We were having problems getting it to print at all at first so I went back to just a few basic shapes without all the detail to start. Plus this allowed me to do a better job at scaling. The new model is exactly at 1/3000th scale. The result is at the right. As you can see, it didn't quite print correctly. The ball at the tail failed to print as the support I added in for it wasn't strong enough. The head is a little off kilter and not completely spherical because the neck region was too skinny. Basically they said that as it was printing, the lower layers hadn't quite cooled so it was wobbly and moving around (Interestingly, printing more than one at a time, so it moves back and forth between models, would actually help with this). Otherwise it came out quite well. So I've prepared a new file for round 2 where I have a better support at the base and a slightly thicker neck. We'll see how that one turns out. The good news is that I now work just down the hall from the 3D printer and can interate faster on this. Before it was a 25 minute drive from my house to the library on campus where the printer is. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
 June 5, 2014 - 1:39pm | I like where this is going. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 5, 2014 - 7:28pm | Cool. I realy would love to try this. -iggy |
June 5, 2014 - 8:07pm | They were busy at the reference desk today so I'll give them my updated file tomorrow. Hopefully it will be done sometime early next week. Total cost for the failed one was $0.60. It was right on the borderline so the final might cost $0.90 as I had to add a little more mass to stabalize it but still that's not a bad price. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 6, 2014 - 4:10pm |  Okay, here's take two. This one came out much better. I redesigned the support for the bottom sphere where the engines attach (removed in this image) and thickened up the neck a little bit.The printer has issues with curved surfaces and they don't come out as clean as you'd like but it's not bad. The bottom ball is a little rough on the bottom side and the "head" is slightly elongated but I actually like the look. There is a bit of "hair" on the engines and supports that I need to trim off. That's just an artifact of the printer having to jump around to print that bit of the model and easily comes off with an knife or bit of sand paper. I think the only other change I need to make to have the print be better is to thicken up the engine struts. they are a little rough on the underside where they connect to the body and making them a little thicker should help there. I'm also going to try to add in some more detail on the body (airlocks and such) and see what happens. Hopefully I can get another model printed next week. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 13, 2014 - 2:38pm |  Take 3:Here's the next one. I thickened up the engines and engine struts to give it a bit more structual integrety. I had a devil of a time getting this one to print. There were about 7-8 print attempts between the last successful model and this one. Every attempt, through 4 different tweaks of the model, to print this on the high resolution setting, which had worked just fine for the previous one, failed miserably (sometimes spectacularly). So in the end, this one was printed at the "low" resolution (0.2mm) instead of the "high" resolution (0.1mm). Those are the vertical resolutions, the horizontal resolution is basically the same for both of them. The good news is that the printing is twice as fast at the low resolution and the cost is lower ($0.20 per gram instead of $0.30), but the engines and mounts are a little rougher (which I'll see tonight if I can clean up with file and sandpaper). I tried adding in a bit more detail (i.e. bay doors). They are there but you can't see them very well. If you didn't know what you were looking for I don't think you'd even notice them (They definitely don't show up in this slightly out of focus cell phone picture). I think I would have to make the details a bit more pronounced for them to show up in the print. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 13, 2014 - 8:03pm | Okay so what was the secret to accessing this site since the Memorial Day weekend? This is the first time I was able to see the site since then (see as in open the site, never mind logging in) and I find posts dating back to the 5th... |
June 13, 2014 - 8:47pm | Okay so what was the secret to accessing this site since the Memorial Day weekend? This is the first time I was able to see the site since then (see as in open the site, never mind logging in) and I find posts dating back to the 5th... Technical difficulties with the site. Tom temporarily moved it to his dot info site and harvested emails and sent a mass mailing- you might want to update your email as he told me that about 50 came back as undeliverable. EDIT 1: Welcome back to the digital froniter. EDIT 2: @Tom, I want one or more. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 14, 2014 - 6:26am | Okay so what was the secret to accessing this site since the Memorial Day weekend? This is the first time I was able to see the site since then (see as in open the site, never mind logging in) and I find posts dating back to the 5th... Did my second e-mail not make it to you either. You e-mailed me and asked what was up a couple of weeks ago and I thought I sent you a reply with the information. That's strange. In any case, the domain owner, which is not me, has reregistered the domain and it's working again. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 14, 2014 - 7:00am | Did my second e-mail not make it to you either. You e-mailed me and asked what was up a couple of weeks ago and I thought I sent you a reply with the information. That's strange. In any case, the domain owner, which is not me, has reregistered the domain and it's working again. Actually I sent a PM via facebook to you. I do need to update my email info, I'm switching to a new one but the old one is still working, it just gets 10,000 spam emails per day (mostly facebook crap) and I don't like weeding through it anymore. But the question is...was the site down all this time, was it down sporadically, or was my server just not able to find it? I ask as I checked daily since Memorial Day weekend (Iggy was in town and had PM'd me contact info before the weekend, and I was not able to retrieve it since the site went down over the weekend for me) and yesterday was the first time I was able to see the site (I was getting 404 messages and "unable to find SF.us" etc) Yet "new posts" in this thread date back to June 5... |
June 14, 2014 - 7:40am | That's right it was on facebook and I see I did reply. Don't know if it went through but it's there in my history. Basically the starfrontiers.us domain was off-line from memorial day until a couple of days ago. In the meantime, we switched over to using sfus.starfrontiers.info (and if you look in the address bar on your browser, you'll see where still actually there. The login on starfrontiers.us just redirects to sfus.starfrontiers.info. I haven't had time to switch it back and probably won't until tomorrow as my sister is getting married today). Since I host the site locally (i.e. I'm typing this in on the computer the webserver is running on), I was able to make the change to keep the site up and running. So the site itself has been up but inaccessible through the regular domain name. I sent an e-mail out to everyone letting them know of the name switch until we could get the regular domain working again. Those who got the e-mail and noticed have had access to the site through the alternate domain. If there is ever any problems, try that domain as it will always be a backup. I'll be sending another e-mail out once I get things switched back over. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 14, 2014 - 8:38am | Ah that makes sense. I missed the PM from FB as well, just been busy at work lately. I switched emails on the SF.us account to an Outlook.com addy that is new/not connected to FB etc so I can use that as a better email now. RichardVegas83@outlook.com |
 June 15, 2014 - 7:47am | Oh, technical problems. I thought TSR or whoever now owns the rights shut it down. Glad to hear it was just a tech glitch. I'm likeing the Sathar destroyer there, but don't remember being so many bumps going around the central section like that. Maybe 4 at the most. Or is this a new concept to allow a Sathar ship greater fields of fire to reflect the game play of the ships have that? In every age, in every place, the deeds of men remain the same. |
June 15, 2014 - 9:37am | Okay, getting this back on topic. Here's a picture of the model along with the frigate and light cruiser miniatures from the original Sathar ships boxed set. As to Sargonarhes's question, those bumps are actually the back ends of shuttles. This is a scale model of the Sathar destroyer that I did full deck plans of in this Sathar Destroyer Technical Manual. I'm actually still working on the final details and determining exactly what the 3D printer can print. My next iteration will try to put the airlock and bay doors on and make them stand out. There are doors in this model on the upper bulge but they don't stand out as the printer couldn't do quite that level of detail. Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 15, 2014 - 7:29pm |  And
here it is painted. A nice shiny red reflective hull. Some of the
detail work around the shuttles (the black dots) could be better but not
bad for the first miniature I've ever painted. The gold paint on the tips of the engines are so reflective that you can actually see the reflection of the ship in them. I kept thinking I had gotten some red paint on the tips. :)? Ad Astra Per Ardua! My blog - Expanding Frontier Webmaster - The Star Frontiers Network & this site Founding Editor - The Frontier Explorer Magazine Managing Editor - The Star Frontiersman Magazine |
June 15, 2014 - 10:37pm | And that is why I really like the design of the Sathar warships. They have that cool retro look about them. They have hulls that look like something from an old Buck Rogers comic, and the engines look like the nacelles from Star Trek. Great work with the print-out. I cant wait to see more. |
