Scratch Build – In Progress ISD KRAKEN - Leviathan Class Star Destroyer - 2Servo Turbo Laser Turrets – Mechanical - 26-02-2021

ISD KRAKEN - Leviathan Class Star Destroyer

Project Asphiax
Commodore Vaas Crulak looked down at the dossier on the desk in front of him. He was standing in Chief Engineer Titus Cibel's office across from a large viewport. Through that massive viewport, Crulak could see the framings of a massive angular shape suspended within the single massive gantry that comprised the majority of Manfred Shipyard. Scooping up the papers off the desk, he strode across the office to the viewport and gazed out at the mighty structure. The incomplete framing formed a basic wedge-shaped rib cage of an Imperial Class capital ship. Crulak had never seen the like, he glanced down at the dossier again. Emblazoned across the front of the folder was two words.
Project ASPHIAX.
Crulak flipped open the folder.
Leviathan Class Star Destroyer - Kraken
Hull registration number: ET25824
Prototype long range Battle Cruiser

Crulak's eyes fell to the bottom of the page, where the document version control number was listed. Version 4. He looked up again at the massive structure in front of him. Crulak commanded four Venator Cruisers. Two of them could fit end to end, with a third hiding bow to stern inside the hulls at her widest part without any of the three of them even touching the outer armor plating of the Kraken's hull. The Venators were aging and due to be replaced. Crulak had been assigned to the Kraken to with his entire fleet as a protective detail, and as her eventual crew. He would oversee the Imperial Navy's interests on the project, and had the authority to work directly with the Project's Chief Engineer on design considerations. Chief Engineer Cibel was amenable to the arrangement, as long as Crulak provided the means to make any proposed modifications
.......
To be continued in the novella !
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The ISD Experience
Like many young star wars fans in the 90's, I (Spacec) first encountered the Thrawn story arc in Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire series... and was summarily blown away. It was these stories that really made Star Wars "a thing" for me growing up. The movies were great, but as I'll never count myself as a force user (or will I...), Thrawn represented the kind of stature that can be achieved without mystical powers, and he did it from the bridge of his Imperial Star Destroyer Chimera.

(credit fractalsponge.net)
So Naturally, when Sander (ASPHIAX) and I first came to terms on what we were setting out to do, we were focusing on the ISD II. This lasted about a week, if that. As I've come to learn the more I've researched and interacted with the Star Wars community - ISD designs have a number of weaknesses and oddities that aren't easily explained away. Tactically, while I love some aspects of the ship - others puzzled me. Given the investment going into the project, I began to look at other options. From a variety of other Star Wars games and mods I play, I knew of the Allegiance class Star Destroyer and after coming across Ansel Hsaio's rendition, I quickly fell in love with the hull design. The stepped nature of the Allegiance's super structure is superior and aesthetically pleasing.

(credit fractalsponge.net)

Ground Rules

All good projects start with the user stories.
Here are the ground rules we set for the Kraken.
Fully functional turrets (rotate, elevate).
Laser beams in said turrets (never aim small).
Synchronized controls of the turrets in groups.
Ship can rotate on the stand.
Ship can be pitched and yawed to some degree on the stand.
Fully functional Liquid Cooled PC seated neatly inside the ship itself.
Free standing or column mounted stand.
.01mm greeble detail.
LED lit hull lighting.
Easy access Computer hardware for servicing.
Thermal engineering to avoid melting things, starting fires, or cooking the hardware.
5ft or so in length. (I wouldn't have believed this if I didn't still have the emails).
Rear hangar deck.
Armed and Armored underside (Moar guns. MOAR GUNS).
Armored Hull plates.
Awesome.
Star Destroyer -esq.
This will not be a small job!


(credit fractalsponge.net)

Allegiance Class?

At this point, Sander started to block mock up the hull. We quickly realized that the step hull nature of the Allegiance class gave the 'bridge' structure a much angrier, forward leaning feel. The sort of look that made you feel as if the ship was coming to take your lunch money. We liked it. The Allegiance Class is quite a bit longer than the ISDII, and doing the math, the ISDII from above looked a bit chubby for her length. This lead us to fully switch over to the Allegiance class base model, with plans to modify the hull structure to fit a hangar deck. While the ship was originally planned as an ISD, we were going to lose the hanger deck to the PSU heat exhaust, so it had been in our mind to place the hangar deck in the aft superstructure anyways. How we would do this was a different story, but it was the idea.



Leviathan Class!

This was where Sander and I started doing more study into what we would want out of a ship. The idea was that she would operate solo in deep space. History has taught me the value of the carrier air wing, and I loved the old 1995 game Tie Fighter. Further, the turret placement and field of fire. The design and hull shape of the ISD should provide for excellent fields of fire. This wasn't all that well mapped out in Star Wars, and with the small caliber cannons mounted inside the hull of the ship - it felt odd. We adopted a Dreadnaught approach. All big guns. Again, the Allegiance helped with this, as she mounted quite a bit of firepower. As the majority of our focus was internal components, hull support structures and the turrets. The ship stayed an Allegiance Class for quite a while. In many ways, she's still has significant similarities to Ansel's work. Honestly, if you are interested in Star Wars and have not checked out his work - do yourself a favor. Click here, or here. Ansel's artwork served as an inspiration of what is possible throughout the project and he is a credit to the Star Wars universe.

To provide you with some details of the work done so far:

• Design work started late 2017
• Work hours spent in design upto 1-8-2020 : Uncountable
• Size 254 cm long (100 inch), 140 cm wide and 69 cm high
• 
  
• Estimated weight after completion : 75 kg (160 pounds)
• Work hours to completing: +/- 300 (Design Assemble, Test)
• Print hours: +/- 2000

The KRAKEN has to be finished before the 4th of may celebrations in 2021. Well actually about a 3 weeks before that as it needs to be transported to Seattle USA

Current Status

WAIT ... whut? Yess project ASPHIAX will be 2 ships!
One going to Seattle USA and one staying in Boxtel the Netherlands.

Level 1 foam mockup - just to get a feel for her!

I made a fully functional laser turret but unfortunately we couldnt source small enough lasers as this is 3 times the size we need!​

 

To be able to build the ships we were honoured to have been joined by the following companies. Thanks to all the people involved in making these mad dreams possible, you know who you are ;-)





The guys over at FormFutura will be supplying us with all the filaments.
Important part of the design of certain objects is the selection of the right materials as they will be directly in constant heated air flow or in contact with large amounts of leds.

 

RESERVED!

 

Oh lawd he coming!

 

Well there goes the neighbourhood... About time this went up!

 

Yessss

 

OMG!!!
I know Sanders project a couple of years ago but this now is next level

 

Some of the work so far, mind you this is way to large for the ship but had to first get it all working before I can start minaturising.

 

Was already here for quite some time mate ;-)

Yep Dark Side incoming! Thanks!

Hey mate! Its finally live, cant wait for your new input!

Thanks mate , you mean the Yazi or the IMPERIAL AT-AT ?

 

The Yazi

Impressive

 

He'll Yeh more please

 

@bawjaws - The intro read like that's what happened when someone saw the Yazi.
Great to see you back Asphiax.

 

Thanks Cheaps, it is good to be back!
Working hard on the next update!

 

It was certainly influenced by the reality of how it actually panned out. There may have been a wee bit of scope creep along the way...

 

Niiiice, this looks like its going to be an epic project, cant wait to see it complete with working turrets!

 

Coming from the man that casts his own aluminum parts, thats high praise!
(Awesome work by the way!)

 

In designing the ship Spacec and I went all out. We actually analysed navel and aircraft carriers to get a better feel for how one would lay out the 3d printed greebles in a way that makes sense.
Had numerous design and discussion sessions on what we want to have, what the best locations would be and how the objects would not interfere with each other.
So far we had the following objects we wanted to place on the trench. If you can come up with something that would be cool to add, drop it in the comments!
- Cyrion Shield arrays
- Anti Star Fighter point Defense missile launch clusters
- High Speed tracking AA cannons
- Thruster ports
- Hyper space triangulation / Sig-INT Sensor stations
- Life pods
- External repair Droid Stations
- Cooling ribs
- External Docking Ports
- Hanger bays

 

IDEA:
- Light the horizontal trench with fiber optic strands
- Make the greeble plates interchangable so we can swap them out for battle damage or just updated versions.
- Use a led strip instead of seperate leds with fiber coupling
For all the greebles and structures we have planned in the side horizontal part of the ship (called the trench) i had to design a holder for the ledstrips and ledfoam. This helps in dispursing the light and provides a clean way to fix the PMMA fiber strands that pass the light through the greeble plate.
It also doubles as the resting place for the top hull that needs to be removable to access the hardware and hard tubing.



The led-trench holder is fixated with screws and epoxy for it to be tough enough to withstand numerous opeing and closing of the tophull.
It features three indentations on each trench side. Two Ion Cannons are in the outer and inner most indentations with a hangar bay between them in the middle of the ship. The trench indent parts have been designed so it can host a coverplate with all the greebles and structures needed for the ion cannon to rotate (manually) and the hangar bay to close (servo driven)

Here is the led foam and a test part of the greeble plates I have printed in Titan ABS from FormFutura. Being a sustainable living expert (solarpanels, heatpumps, insulation) I will not be using the normal Titan ABS but ReForm - rTitan which consists of high quality runoffs in the factory that normally would get thrown away but is now reformed into a new filament! I expect to use a lot of ABS as it is much better heat resistant then PLA, I will add a post later explaining exactly how I selected the materials and printed them.

The trench-Greeble plate needs to be pefectly level with the ship and it consists of several layers that are screwed together (not glued) as to be able to zwap it out later for updated/different parts.
I created a rim cover that will be 3D printed to cover up the ugly cuts and provide a clear demarcation point where the hull styrene skin starts.
Below is a quick (and not representative for the final quality parts) print to show the whole assembly.

Here are some quality prints of the greeble plate to test out the designs.
Also you can see how the supersized turret would be crazy large compared to the ship. I will create a functional one, but this has to be reduced to 1/3rd of its scale.
What is correct to scale is this laptop and a test print of one of the main engines. Its massive, weighs 413 grams and took 38 hours to print! Again PLA will not be possible to use as it could face a constant stream of 50 to 60c warm air that would destroy the print over a few months time.


That was it for last weeks work. Catch you all next week!
Follow SCIFI OCD on facebook for daily updates!

 

Your attention to detail is amazing!