Making an Imperial Raider that works for me

This is the Imperial Raider. In 2014, Fantasy Flight Games introduced capital ships to their X-Wing miniatures game and wanted an Imperial corvette which could go toe-to-toe with the Rebel Blockade Runner. There was nothing that quite worked within the existing Star Wars canon so LucasArts gave them permission to design something new. The result was the Raider. Since appearing in the game it has transitioned into official canon, notably appearing prominently in EA’s Battlefront II video game.

I’ve had a Raider for several years now, and enjoy playing with it. But the design’s never quite worked for me. I’m not saying it’s bad – lots of people love it – but it’s never quite felt right for me. For a long time I’ve thought about taking a knife and glue to my model and modifying it into something I like better. But it’s an expensive toy and I’ve never quite dared… until now. Over the last couple of weeks I’ve finally transformed my Raider, and I think the result works better – at least for me.

So first of all, what’s wrong with the official design? I’ve got a few, interconnected issues:

• It all feels a bit too sleek, a bit too one-piece; it doesn’t seem to fit very well within the kitbashed aesthetic of the original movies. It feels a bit video-gamey, a bit too ‘cool’.
• This is exemplified by those TIE wings. I really don’t like them. They’ve got no business being on a ship of this size – they just don’t make sense within the established design language of Imperial ships. They also cover a lot of the nicest details on the model.
• The ship feels a bit… faceless. That squat command deck barely commands attention, which is instead directed towards the TIE wings, as the most contrasty parts of the model. The result is a sort of nondescript triangle with some silly oversized wings.
• Connected with this, the scale is quite hard to read. How big is this thing meant to be? Because it’s kind of faceless, it’s hard to know. This is demonstrated in Battlefront II, where the scale seems to be all over the place, and at odds with the previously established size of the FFG ship. Can this fit fighters inside or not?

Some of these thoughts only crystallised as I was working on the modifications. As I went into the project, I had a couple of broad goals: I wanted a more kitbashed aesthetic that looked like it might have been designed in the late 70s or early 80s, and I wanted to make it adhere more to the design language of larger Imperial ships, in particular those of the earlier part of the war. I only had 2 fairly clear ideas of how I was going to do this: I was going to take the wings off, but add extensions to the hull plating to keep the same overall width, so as to avoid making it even more of a simple arrowhead; and I wanted to increase the amount of details protruding from the hull, adding things like turbolaser turrets, aerials and dishes. I had a few design touchstones in mind, but nothing I studied overly closely.

First was the Consular Cruiser from the prequels. I’d already built one of these and I liked the central section with its array of sensors and communications equipment. As a Republic ship, it would make sense for similar elements to transition into a similarly-sized Imperial vessel.

Second were actual real-world naval corvettes. Just as Star Destroyers echo the design of real-world battleships, I wanted something that evoked smaller military ships. That ties in with the desire to have more ‘stuff’ protruding above the hull.

Finally, I was thinking about other fan designers of Star Wars ships, and particularly EC Henry’s work reinterpreting early, or barely-seen, designs from the original films, such as this:

It’s also worth calling out these fan designs I found on the FFG forum from when the Raider was first announced. They did a lot to shape my early ideas about where I wanted to go with this, and to convince me that chopping up the ship could lead to something I would like.

But as for my actual method, once I’d taken off the wings and made those hull extensions, I pretty much just sat down with my box of spare parts and bits of other models and tried things out till I had something I liked. And here’s what I ended up with:

I’m happy with this. It’s very much a mini-Star Destroyer, but I’m happy with that. It makes sense in the same way a naval corvette is pretty much a mini destroyer. It’s got a much more defined superstructure that draws a bit on prequel ships like the Venator and even Aethersprite starfighter. These were unconscious influences at first, but as I recognised them, I decided to go with it. They make sense in terms of the development of an early Civil-War ship.

I think the more pronounced bridge provides more of a visual focus and, together with the larger turrets, helps establish the scale better. I’ve got the antennas, turrets and communications dish, but actually fewer of these than I’d planned. With the raised bridge, I didn’t feel like I needed too many of them, and although I toyed with other Star Destroyer elements like the shield generator bulbs and the X-shaped tractor beam emitter ‘tiara’ that sits on top of the bridge tower, I didn’t feel like they quite worked visually, or made sense on a ship of this size.

I’m very happy with the removed wings. There’s some lovely detail on the bottom of the model which they almost totally conceal (I briefly considered turning the whole thing upside down but it was tricky to work with the mounting pegs) and with the hull extensions, it still feels balanced and not overly narrow.

Finally, I repainted it in a much paler, off-white colour scheme closer to the Star Destroyers of A New Hope and Rogue One. This ties in with a back-story I’d cooked up that this is the Raider I class, which was in use before the destruction of the first Death Star, particularly on the Empire’s furthest frontiers. As the Empire recognised the threat posed by Rebel starfighters, the Raider was redesigned with the latest, more streamlined, technology as more of an anti-starfighter vessel. Nicely, it turns out that Battlefront II refers to the Raider there as a Raider II, so this all fits quite nicely.

I hope other people will like this, but I’m sure many will consider it sacrilege. Ultimately, I’m happy with it and that’s all I care about. Next time I field this alongside a fleet of TIEs, it’s going to feel a bit more like my kind of Star Wars. I’m looking forward to it.

Building a Star Wars Medical Frigate

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted here, I know. Sorry about that. I’ve been busy. Partly work, partly not. One of the things I’ve been busy with since I last posted is getting somewhat obsessed with the X-Wing miniatures game. It’s a fun and in-depth tactics game involving little Star Wars spaceships, so regular followers of this blog will see why I like it. But I don’t want to talk about the game itself today.

Because I’ve also been getting caught up in the arts and crafts aspect of the hobby. Mostly that’s meant repainting ships, which I’ve done a whole lot of. But from time to time I’ve also made my own ships. That started with an extremely rough and ready extra TIE Fighter I made not long after getting the starter set, purely to beef up my rather thin Imperial roster. Two years or so on, I now have all the TIE Fighters I could ever want and my ship-building has switched to the vessels that don’t yet exist in the game.

The first proper project I undertook was Director Krennic’s shuttle from Rogue One. When that was a success I moved on to something a bit more challenging, with more colour and a lot more surface detail – the Consular-Class Republic cruiser that appears at the beginning of the Phantom Menace and throughout the Clone Wars. That went very well, and I still love looking at it up on my bookcase. Now that a growing slate of Republic ships are appearing in the game, I’m looking forward to flying it properly.

But what I’ve always really wanted to tackle was the Rebel medical frigate that first appeared in the Empire Strikes Back. The Nebulon-B Escort Frigate, to give it its proper name, is one of the most iconic and gorgeous big ships in Star Wars, its unorthodox shape making for an extremely visually interesting ship that combines power and fragility, as well as a wealth of details that make it a model-maker’s dream. Or nightmare, depending how you look at it. I’ve tried making one before, early in my X-Wing career. I built a 1:350 scale one out of foamcore, card and paper-clay.

The card Nebulon-B. It’s lost its stand and static discharge vanes in the intervening years.

This went OK and I had a lot of fun doing it, but you can’t get a lot of detail out of card and it turned out I’d made it too big to really be practical to use in-game. As my shipmaking skills grew, I knew I wanted to revisit it and make a slightly smaller Nebulon-B out of plastic.

This summer, I did.

Further Experiments in Ancient Baking: Pop-tarblets

I’ve been trying my hand at ancient baking again, over on the CREWS Project blog.

A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote about my visit to the British Museum, one person commented that the cuneiform tablets looked like pop-tarts. Anyone familiar with the CREWS Project and our love of ancient baking will know that this is the sort of challenge we can’t let go. I haven’t had pop-tarts since I was a kid, and not too often then, but it turns out they’re not too difficult to make. Naturally we had to give it a try.

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Atlas Obscura Article

At the end of last year I made an Ugaritic biscuits cooking video. I kind of forgot to mention it on here what with all the pre-Christmas busyness, but it did moderately well. Now, in a slightly surreal turn of events for me, the website Atlas Obscura has picked up on it and interviewed me for an article:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ancient-writing-baking-cookies-cuneiform-near-east

Or, if you just want the original video, here it is:

 

CREWS Exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum: Writing in Cyprus and the Ancient Mediterranean

It was my birthday last Monday, and I was lucky enough to spend it behind the scenes at the Fitzwilliam Museum. Together with my fellow members of the CREWS Project, we were helping with the installation of a new temporary exhibition on ancient writing, a collaboration between our project and the Museum.

Making Ancient Tablets 5 – Further stylus improvements

About a year ago I posted a series following my attempts to write Ugaritic cuneiform, first in plasticine and then in clay. I ended up using the square end of a chopstick for a stylus, and this is what I’ve been doing ever since, including in my cuneiform baking. It works, but it’s fiddly – the stick has to be held just right to make the wedge-shaped prints, and it takes practice to stop them being large and clumsy.

Last weekend I took part in a Prehistory and Archaeology Day as part of Cambridge University’s Festival of Ideas. Hosted by Cambridge Archaeological Unit, this offered hundreds of members of the public – mostly children – the chance to try their hands at a wide range of archaeology-related activities, from spear-throwing and archery to excavation and osteology. The ancient writing systems stall was particularly eclectic, with academics from the Faculty of Classics and the Division of Archaeology showing visitors how to write in Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Linear B and alphabetic Greek.

Decorating Eggs in the Ancient World

It’s Easter! Which means everyone’s developed a bizarre preoccupation with eggs. How we chortle as adverts everywhere wheel out the same old egg-puns as if they’re the first to think of them. Egg-straordinary! Never mind; it means we get some chocolate. I’m particularly partial to Mini Eggs myself.

As you probably know, for many it’s traditional to paint and decorate eggs at Easter. Like many Christian festivals, there’s a healthy vestige of earlier practices in Easter, as the Church sought to appropriate and sanitise pagan spring fertility celebrations. The name Easter itself most likely derives from the Germanic goddess Ēastre, which in turn seems to come from the Proto-Indo-European word for dawn, and so is cognate with classical goddesses such as Eos or Aurora. So it’s no surprise to learn that decorating eggs is a practice with roots much older than Christianity. In fact we have painted eggs from the ancient Near East which date as far back as the third millennium BC.

How do egg-shells manage to survive for nearly five thousand years in the archaeological record?

Two answers. One: lots of them were found in tombs. Two: they used ostrich eggs.

Minoan ostrich egg rhyton. Late Bronze Age

How to make a cylinder seal

I’ve been making cylinder seals lately. Here’s a thing I wrote for the CREWS Project blog about how to do it and some of the background.

Enjoy!

In the ancient world, if you wanted to sign something you used a seal. They came in various shapes and sizes – stamps, seals, signet rings – but the general idea was always the same: you had a small object that you could press into clay or wax to mark it with a design unique to you – just like a signature. This could be used in various ways. In the Near East, for example, legal decisions or transactions might be recorded on a tablet, and then all the witnesses would press their seals into the clay next to their names. In other cases it could function as an official lock – a door or container-lid could have a blob of clay pressed over the join and this would be marked with an official’s seal. If the clay was broken – or if it had been replaced with one without…

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Making Maps for Board Games or Illustrations

One of the comments on my post about my board game, Ancient Horror, asked how I made its board, which features a Mediterranean map. I responded with a short answer there, but I thought it would be worth doing a more in-depth look. I need hardly stress how important maps are in science fiction and especially fantasy, but they’re also very important for archaeologists. I had to draw at least half a dozen for my PhD, showing artefact distributions and other things, and I also redrew one of the maps in a recent new edition of a book by my former supervisor.

In this post I’m going to show you how I tend to go about it.

This isn’t the map for my supervisor. This one’s from The Hobbit.

One of the maps from my PhD thesis

Making Ancient Tablets 4 – Painting clay to look more like clay

Every time I think I’m done with the clay tablets, I find just one more thing. You can read up on the full story about my experiments with writing ancient tablets at these links:

Part 1 – Ugaritic, plasticine and Lego styli

Part 2 – A better stylus and first attempts at biscuits

Part 3 – Linear A Clay Play Day, Linear A cake and second attempt at biscuits

And for more on the academic component of Clay Play Day and the Linear A seminars, take a look at Anna Judson’s write-up.

Right, on to this instalment, which is unashamedly aesthetic rather than academic. When I ended part 3, my newly-made clay tablets were drying in the CREWS Project office, looking like this:

I’ve been working from home for a while, but over the weekend I finally collected them and saw them for the first time dry. They looked good, but the pristine new air-drying clay had dried very bright, making them look like they were straight out of a brickyard or a primary school art class. They looked a bit stark on my mantelpiece, so I decided to paint them.