have you seen this guy's work?

Really good - I really admire and envy people with such crafting skills (and luckily there seem to be quite some)...or even just the will to try it.
 
Fighter Models Measured Twice & Cut Once (January 27, 2010)

Herr Koos has scratch-built several impressive Wing Commander models. The high quality ships show off the time and effort he put into the designs prior to starting construction. The Banshee, Hellcat and Excalibur are hollow, and the more curvy Vampire is made out of solid balsa wood.





Let me start with a bit of background: I'm a long time model builder. I started off with plastic kits and I've since progressed to scratch-building my own designs from balsa wood. My collection includes five WC ships (which I'm quite proud of, I might add :) ). Building something from scratch as opposed to using a model kit obviously means you have to draw your own plans to work from. This involved hours of taking measurements from the game manuals, and even from in-game screenshots to get the look right.


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Original update published on January 27, 2010
 
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Ha! Sorry to resurrect this topic, but I finally have an account and can comment on my own ships!

For those who may be interested, I will hopefully start a project soon to update these beauties and make them more realistic. They are more than 10 years old now and in dire need of some work.

Scooby-Doo and gevatterLars have very generously pointed me in the direction of some additional source material. I only had screenshots and game manuals to work from back in the day, but thanks to the internet I now have a wealth of info at my fingertips! :)

My plan is to tackle the Hellcat first. I will post pics and keep you updated as I go. In the meantime, thanks for giving my work some love. Hopefully I can give you some more stuff to comment on over the coming months.
 
My plan is to tackle the Hellcat first. I will post pics and keep you updated as I go. In the meantime, thanks for giving my work some love. Hopefully I can give you some more stuff to comment on over the coming months.

That's great! Looking forward to the updates.
 
Driving to visit the parent this coming week, will load them in the back of the car then. I can't wait to get started, I can tell you.
 
The family has finally been re-united! After a decade gathering dust at my parents' house, I finally took the plunge and moved my entire model collection to my own place. There are many, many others I won't show here, since you guys will be interested in the Wing Commander stuff. So, without further ado, here they are:

Y03yxaz.jpg


You'll see they've been joined by a new member: The mighty Paktahn. I never posted pictures of it before since it is still unfinished. Hopefully that will be rectified soon.

Enjoy!

Sny9EEP.jpg


Ninof7A.jpg


lCkmoUk.jpg
 
These are great and rather inspirational - I'd love to have some decorating my living room, very tempted to have a go at putting something similar together. I actually prefer these to the Shapeways models, now don't get me wrong, Klavs is hugely talented and his models are second to none - but I like these big, chunky ships - especially that Paktahn. Awesome.
 
These are great and rather inspirational - I'd love to have some decorating my living room, very tempted to have a go at putting something similar together. I actually prefer these to the Shapeways models, now don't get me wrong, Klavs is hugely talented and his models are second to none - but I like these big, chunky ships - especially that Paktahn. Awesome.

Much appreciated, I'm glad you like them! Hope you meant chunky in a nice way... :D

I'm a big fan of Klavs' work as well. His approach does have several advantages over mine; You can render every detail in 3D before hand which makes it much easier to tweak the design. If I want to make changes it means sanding, cutting and painting! Also with 3D printing you can mass produce and get results very quickly, while building by hand is very time-consuming.

The advantage of scratch-building from wood is that you can go as big as you like, and it's much cheaper than the 3D printing materials. The bigger size also allows you to get some fine detail in there, but the finished model is still very light and surprisingly strong.Personally though, my main reason for going this route is that you get tremendous satisfaction out of crafting something by hand.

If you are interested in doing something similar, be sure to keep an eye on my Hellcat overhaul thread. I'll be posting pictures on my progress and will share some insights into the design and build process.
 
The advantage of scratch-building from wood is that you can go as big as you like, and it's much cheaper than the 3D printing materials. The bigger size also allows you to get some fine detail in there, but the finished model is still very light and surprisingly strong.Personally though, my main reason for going this route is that you get tremendous satisfaction out of crafting something by hand.

If you are interested in doing something similar, be sure to keep an eye on my Hellcat overhaul thread. I'll be posting pictures on my progress and will share some insights into the design and build process.
Any chance you can share some of your design measurements? I'm a wiz in front of a saw, but as the old saying goes, "measure twice and cut once." On a very limited budget so any way to simplify the designs...I'd like to try a hand at building a fighter. I consider these just as awesome as Pericles paper planes but I can build these as big as lumber allows. I can always do tbe math to scale bigger or smaller but a base blueprint of any of your ships would help.
 
Any chance you can share some of your design measurements? .

Sadly all of the original drawings are gone... Should have filed them more carefully I suppose :( I'm busy reworking the Hellcat as we speak though, so I'd be happy to share some basic drawings as soon as they are done.

In the meantime, I suggest you get hold of WC Saga and use the POF Constructor Suite to view the models. You can grab some top-quality screenshots that way, and the Saga models are top-notch.
 
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