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.

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.

Imagining and Deciphering Writing Systems for Games

The lovely people at Eurogamer have let me get my archaeology and linguistics all over their website again. Here’s an article on invented writing-systems in video games and the window-dressing vs puzzle approaches:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-04-imagining-and-deciphering-writing-systems-for-games

Also, if you enjoyed this, a reminder that I did an in-depth thing on the writing-systems of Zelda right here on Ancient Worlds.

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.

A Visual Guide to the Aegean Bronze Age in Doctor Who

Most people probably don’t associate Doctor Who with the Aegean Bronze Age. I mean, why would you? They’ve only done two stories set there and one is entirely missing from the archives. But when you delve a bit more closely, there’s a thread of Bronze Age stuff running through from the very first episode and lasting at least until the end of seventies.

Here’s the TARDIS in the very first episode of Doctor Who, in November 1963. Isn’t it lovely?

And that funny-looking chair is a replica of the stone one found in the ‘throne room’ at the Bronze Age palace of Knossos on Crete.

Imagining the Future in Bricks: The Designs of Lego Space (Part 2 – the 90s)

Last time we left it with the transition into the 90s and the beginning of the controversial neon era of Lego space. This is where it gets difficult for me to analyse things at all objectively. Although I had inherited some early Classic Space from my uncle and had picked up the odd small Futuron and Space Police set, it was with the early 90s sets that I was the right age to really get obsessed in a big way. Everything about these sets is, for me, coloured by nostalgia and immense affection. For a lot of the Lego fan community, this is a ‘silver age’, a come-down after the heights of Classic Space, but nothing will ever supplant the holy trinity of M:Tron, Ice Planet and the second Blacktron theme in my affections. Even so, let’s try and look at them as analytically as we can.

Imagining the Future in Bricks: The Designs of Lego Space (Part 1 – 70s and 80s)

Space Lego.

Have there ever been two words that go together quite so evocatively and conjure such boundless possibility? From 1978 to 1999 Lego released an unbroken sequence of original space sets, more than twenty years’ worth of spaceships, bases, rovers and robots. I was lucky enough to grow up right in the middle of this, a geeky kid as fascinated by space and science fiction as I was by knights and castles. Needless to say, I had a lot of space Lego.

I’ve written elsewhere about my own experience of a childhood lived through Lego bricks, about how those little plastic pieces lent physical reality and material texture to my imagination, how they continue to encode memories of my early life. What I’m interested in here is the world of Lego Space itself, and how it drew from outside inspiration. These ship designs and imagined spaces that mean so much to me – loosely defined but vividly depicted – where did they come from?  What were the influences on the small group of predominantly Danish designers who created them?

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…

View original post 1,118 more words

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