The setup is that I've done a ton of design work on my sci-fi game and started working on larger starships. I don't think the game is about starships as much as small craft like fighter and mecha, but they are around and will probably play a big part. And what is everyone's favorite thing to do in mecha and fighters that isn't blowing each other up? It's blowing each other up defending or attacking a bigger ship like a freighter! That's right, kids, you can't escape escort missions, even in fake space.
I usually build in microspace scale which is nominally anything smaller than minifig scale, though usually a much larger scale than this. Last week's fighters and mecha were way too big but I think these guys are much closer to what I was looking for. If I were to guess, I'd say the small craft builds are probably 3x too big in comparison.
I built the Zephyr first. It looks an awful lot more like a warship than a bulk freighter which I suppose is pretty typical for me. While I'd like to pretend that I just threw it together, I didn't. I wrestled with the thing for several hours before I got it looking the way I want--the engines in particular.I didn't want the cargo containers to be stuck right next to each other and a half stud offset looked too big. I ended up with a studs-ahead configuration which winds up with a weird geometry which isn't quite as tight as I'd wanted but works out well enough anyway. The containers are probably too tall but a plate and a tile was too short and I didn't really want to stack two plates and a tile.
The Zephyr stood on my desk for a few days, taunting me with its warship-ness. I re-wrote some of the fiction so it'd make more sense. It's a fancy bulk freighter. One with some high tech and expensive things in it. That was clearly not going to work for the kind of garbage scow players might own and operate. It's also really big (frigate sized). Well, crap.
This Oriens came next, a workhorse in the sector. The build itself was much easier since I had already established the size, shape, and general layout of the cargo containers. It'd be lame if they weren't compatible, after all. They say that constraint sometimes frees the artist and that's certainly the case here. In fact, I built all three of the other ones within a couple hours because of it.
Because there's an expensive frigate sized freighter that's fancy and expensive, that strongly implies that there's a more affordable frigate sized freighter. I imagine the Mule class is fairly common, hauling a mess of who knows what across the sector. They're expensive because of its size, but not so expensive that only the opulently wealthy can afford them. Sometimes you want a normal train and not a sports train. Sorry, Clarkson.
And the last one is the worst of them, probably. The Junkers class light freighter is the aforementinoned garbage scow. If you're going to play debtrunner you're going to need something that the players might plausibly pay off. Well, this is that ship and it's not very good.I usually build without a lot of outside influences. Well, I mean there's the places I pulled my aesthetic leanings from, but beyond that there's only occasionally fiction that goes with them. This time around I had a fiction and just wanted to build standins. The interesting thing was that I made changes in the other direction, too.
I'd started with an abstract idea of what these ships were, possibly with some ideas of balance, but had no idea what they might look like. This meant that choosing armaments and arcs was pretty scattershot. Building them after the fact meant that I knew roughly what I wanted in terms of armament but then could go back and fix the arcs to be more reasonable because now I knew how they worked. This is fun. I think I'll eventually build all the starships in this way even if I never do anything else with them. Being able to have a strong physical rooting for the fiction isn't a luxury I usually have and I really like that.
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