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.

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.

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.

Making Ancient Tablets 3: More Ancient Baking and Linear A Clay Play Day

I thought I was done for now with making tablets, but this week has turned out to be quite a busy one. This term the linguistics caucus at Cambridge’s Faculty of Classics has been running a Linear A Self-Help Group – sort of a seminar series, but with more baffled shrugging as we struggled to make any sense of the Minoan script. On Wednesday it was the last session of term, which meant two things.

Firstly, it’s traditional that there’s cake, usually decorated with an inscription in the language being studied. I ended up responsible for this this time and went for a chocolate brownie recipe. I decided to decorate it in white chocolate, which was probably a mistake since the window of opportunity for piping the writing between extreme runniness and utter solidity is very narrow. My end result was not as neat as some previous examples, especially those by Cakemeister to the Faculty, Anna Judson, so I did what the Minoans did if in doubt: cover liberally with horns of consecration.

H.P. Lovecraft meets the Bronze Age – Designing Ancient Horror

I wrote recently about the excellent Lovecraftian board game Eldritch Horror. That post was actually something of a preliminary to this one. You see, for the last several months I’ve been working on my own version of Eldritch Horror, set in the East Mediterranean Bronze Age.

Earlier this year, my friend and colleague Anna Judson called us together to play something else – her excellent Mycenopoly: an Aegean Bronze Age themed version of Monopoly, complete with barter system and utilities such as textile works and the ability to build megara instead of hotels. I highly recommend checking out her own blog about it, which went a bit viral, and deservedly so. Apart from having an excellent time with Mycenopoly, the evening left me wondering if it would be possible to do something similar for the game we most often play together, Eldritch Horror.

Making Ugaritic Tablets 2 -Baking Ancient Script Biscuits

A few weeks ago I wrote about my experiments writing Ugaritic cuneiform in plasticine. I’d had some success with a home-made Lego stylus, but it was a little large. My next step was to get hold of a chopstick with a square cross-section and try that. Unfortunately the stick had slightly rounded corners so the impressions were a little soft. Following the advice on this site, I sanded them to get sharper edges, which yielded improved results.

This week I was finally able to start work on the CREWS Project formally, and in honour of the occasion I wanted to try something a little more adventurous: Ugaritic cuneiform biscuits. This turned out to be an interesting exercise, not just because there were biscuits at the end of it, but because it forced me to think about the materiality of the writing material and how it would react.

Cambridge Festival of Ideas: the Ancient Worlds Highlights

The Cambridge Festival of Ideas runs from 17^th to the 30^th October. It’s one of the University’s biggest outreach events and has a wide range of talks, workshops and events open to everybody. A lot of them are specifically design to be family- or child friendly. If you’re in or around Cambridge, I highly recommend checking it out.

The full events list is available on the website, but here are a few things that might be of particular interest to this blog’s readers:

Making Ugaritic tablets 1

I’m about to start a research project into the context of the emergence and use of the Ugaritic writing system in the Late Bronze Age city of Ugarit, on the coast of what’s now Syria. This will be a very interdisciplinary undertaking, blending linguistics, epigraphy, ancient history and archaeology, and is something I’m very excited about. The Ugaritic language and script, though, is not one I currently know (though I do have some experience with Phoenician, which is a related language, but uses a different writing system). What this means is that I have the happy task of learning Ugaritic and its alphabetic cuneiform script (and a bit of Akkadian, just for a bonus).

It quickly became apparent as I practised writing out the cuneiform that it’s slow and cumbersome to have to keep drawing the little triangles on paper and that it would be much more efficient – and authentic – to use a stylus and clay. For my first attempt I used plasticine and a makeshift stylus made out of Lego.