3D Armada Takes Shape on Discord

Wing Commander Discord regular Justice recently acquired a 3D printer and over the past two weeks they've been sharing their progress putting together a fleet of Wing Commander ships for tabletop gaming! I've enjoyed following the little updates so much that I thought it would be good to post them in an update for everyone to see. Justice says "I intend to keep doing more ships, though I'll probably slow down a bit for now. Except for Voidfighters, the games I want to try with these are more capital ship oriented anyway, and for Voidfighters ideally I'd scale up the fighters and print them bigger." They are using 3D models available from Tyrel Lohr.

Came out not too bad considering how tiny these bits are, and considering that I still haven't installed a 0.2 nozzle. Gotta be more careful to not touch the teeny tiny fins on the Hornet. Or use a sturdier material. I only have sturdier filament in colors right now. And print a bunch of them. And then play Full Thrust or Voidfighters or Billion Suns. Something this small I should probably just do a multicolor print, though. Oh well, time to throw some primer on the Hornet. Haven't really painted any of my prints yet, so that'll be a test. Probably would work better in resin, These are a couple models from that user mentioned in the news article recently. I got a cheap fdm printer black Friday. If I was gonna print more Constitutions, I'd probably need to make the struts holding the nacelles either flare into them a bit or actually insert in, it's a little too flexy. Probably would print bigger fighters for Voidfighters, though, since it's a fighter-scale game. Full Thrust would be cool to do with Confed and Kilrathi fleets, though its focus is on capital ships. Fighter squadrons are in there too, though, and it looks like they're especially good for intercepting capship missiles, which tracks well with WC3.

A bit stronger material, but it made the supports stick more to the guns, and they got more bent. Fins intact though

Multicolor print in progress. Probably won't finish before I leave today.

Gotta go, but they're getting there.

Done, but I'm not home to try and remove them.

Not an amazing success, but they are definitely Confed Hornets. Well, plus one test print I used as a flush target. If I print bigger ones, they might separate from support better, or I could slice them in half to print the halves flush and glue them. Or just forget the bottom details and make it flat for tabletop gaming. Options.

A couple more prints. Sliced the Bengal, which is why it has the seam, but the underside looks much nicer that way. Did one scim each way; had to glue one of the guns back on the print-in-place one

A rough paint job for a rough print (my 5 year old did the Raptors). Gonna make some hex bases and print some cats once I have a base design I like. Have a basic one and a plug for ships too thin for a post hole roughed out in Freecad, needs some details like lines to make it easy to see fore/port/aft/stbd. Probably more scims (but printed in color) . Maybe try some at 3x scale too.

One flight-ready Hornet. Glue is drying on a wing of 4 Raptors.

Printer had a little oopsie.

Anyway, I'm getting there

Anyone hungry for some... pancakes?

Ships based, time for bed.

I think I've got enough ships to try a couple games. Now I just need sometime to do it.

Printing some asteroids to have a little space terrain.

Asteroids from last night

Reprinting the confed fighters in a larger size now in one big 6+ hour batch (probably do Kilrathi overnight) to hopefully be easier to see at Voidfighters scale. The others ought to be good for Billion Suns or Full Thrust. Maybe the day after the birthday party I'll get to try them out. Voidfighters doesn't do anything bigger than corvettes, but has a fair amount of fighter customization as well as different pilot skill levels and leadership traits. Billion Suns has recon fighters/fighters/bombers/stealth bombers up through a bunch of capital ship classes, but with no per-ship customization. It has the most interesting scenario setups, with ship purchasing per-round and trying to earn the most credits by completing contracts. Some faction-level customization and upgrades, though. Full Thrust only has fighters if you have carriers to launch and support them, and is more focused on capital ship combat, but the capital ships are super customizable with lots of different weapons and interesting movement options, and one thing fighters can do is intercept capship missiles, which is pretty Wing Commandery. (This is still only like 50 cents worth of filament for 10 fighters and a drayman)

Bigger fighters next to the smaller ones. Still fit nicely on that base size.

Since I'm stubbornly keeping 4 colors on the Kilrathi ships though, that's going to take... 11 hours to print. Maybe I should have combined the black or gray into one or the other. 6 dralthi, 4 gratha, and a few misc transports to absorb some of the filament that would get wasted when it flushes out extra for color changes.

Didn't get much done this week, but here's some Salthi.