3D Printing Tutorial: Modeling & Making a GR-75 Cargo Pod

Jedi, Sith, starfighters, walkers, whatever. No one could argue that the true hero of the Star Wars universe is the homely GR-75 medium transport. Cheap, poorly built, cargo literally simply floating in the void, well past due for retirement, clean lines marred by all manner of greeblies, hull panels invariably burned through… I love it.

A GR-75 evacuating Rebels from Hoth, escorted by X-Wings.

A GR-75 evacuating Rebels from Hoth, escorted by X-Wings.

container-tokenNot unrelated, wargaming is all about supply containers and cargo bits. “Buck up, soldier, we’re shipping you across the galaxy to fight horrible monsters over… some oil drums… and maybe a weapons crate.” So in crafting missions for our Molokh Gambit X-Wing Miniatures narrative campaign event, of course there’s going to be a Supply Depot scenario.

Just like the shuttle mission, that means we need cool tokens for the mission. A couple good 3D printable options already exist. There’s a great 3D rendition of the art on the Den of Thieves scenario tokens that come with the Millenium Falcon (remixed here to be printable w/ no supports). At a larger size is the Class A container from the X-Wing and TIE Fighter video games, which has also been made into a BFF-1 Bulk Freighter.

Neither of those worked for me though. I wanted something that could be printed without needing to cut supports or glue halves, was small like the container token to minimize impact on the basic game dynamics, and ideally had fewer Imperial associations. So I modeled the cargo pods on the underside of FFG’s GR-75 model.

This tutorial is a walkthrough of that, in hopes that newcomers to 3D modeling and printing might learn from seeing the process of constructing this simple artifact. These designs have also been uploaded to Thingiverse as a free download. In addition, I have a previous article up more generally introducing 3D printing for miniatures.

It's a hunk of falling-apart junk, so of course the Rebels would decide the transport could do double duty as an assault ship...

It’s a hunk of falling-apart junk, so of course the Rebels would decide the transport could do double duty as an assault ship…

Shape

Fantasy Flight’s GR-75 model is really fun. There’s a ton of detail, and just enough color to really draw the eye onto them. Most captivating is the underside, with a whole mess of tiny cargo pods sprinkled with bright colors. It’s exquisite.

Fantasy Flight's GR75 model.

Fantasy Flight’s GR75 model.

Pods filling the underside cargo bay of the medium transport.

Pods filling the underside cargo bay of the medium transport.

Fortunately for my task here, these pods have a distinctive but really simple design:

  • The core shape is basically a central box with two large angled wings;
  • The wings are themselves top and bottom triangles with a thin central box;
  • There are recesses on the top and bottom of the wings;
  • The front and back faces have pads with slightly angled corner cutouts;
  • The top is textured with two boxes and two circles.

Easy. The one detail I opted to skip is that the front and back faces have slight angles to their top and bottom halves. This feature would be a hassle for me to model, the loss of it wouldn’t really impair the look, and it’s probably largely a production requirement. Vertical faces of plastic injection molded parts have to be drafted (swept back) so that the piece doesn’t get stuck in the die or the metal scrape across and mar the surface as the two halves of the mold are pulled apart and the component ejected. That’s probably the primary driver of why these faces are angled. This isn’t a concern in 3D printing however, as the part is formed in place with no encasing mold.

Cargo pod deconstruction.

Cargo pod deconstruction.

Scale

With that shape deconstruction, the next question is “How big?” I decided to upscale my cargo pods to 1/270, the nominal scale of X-Wing’s large and small ships. The huge ships, like the GR-75, are done at a mix of scales to tradeoff between manufacturability, cost, gameplay, and look. As you might guess, this is a whole huge topic area online that dives way deep into the “correctness” of FFG’s models versus previously published material, with many lists around cataloging the variances.

In this case, there are no concrete canonical measurements for the GR-75. Length, width, etc., are not published in its starwars.com data bank entry, and they’ve never been given in authoritative roleplaying books, video games, and so on. A well established baseline though, derived from comparison to other ships and as reported by Wookieepedia, is that the “real world” transport is 90 meters long.

It fills me with no little joy that so many people have produced such serious documentation for so many Star Wars ships. #seriousbusiness!

It fills me with no little joy that so many people have produced such serious documentation for so many Star Wars ships. #seriousbusiness!

FFG’s model is 225 millimeters long. Given the 90m length, that means it’s at exactly 1/400 scale (225mm/90,000mm = 1/400). If the model were done at the same 1/270 scale of the smaller ships, it would be 50% longer, 333mm. No doubt FFG decided that would cost too much to manufacture, even if the gameplay was reasonable—there’s only so big you can make a ship and still have it fly around on a kitchen table.

Moving on to the pods, I started by taking precise measurements of the overall extents as well as the vertical & horizontal central boxes. The pods were a little tricky to measure in place, and they no doubt vary a bit due to minute differences in cooling and plastic shrinking rates as they were cast, but some basic numbers are easily attained. Sampling a bunch of them, I came up with a range for each dimension. Those were roughly averaged and then upscaled by the trivial formula (observed * 400) / 270. That output I adjusted ad hoc to produce nice numbers. This isn’t rocket science, and it’s a lot easier to work with a 17mm wide piece than 16.59mm.

Measuring the pods.

Measuring the pods.

Working notes of observed measurements and calculations.

Working notes of observed measurements and calculations.

FFG’s 1/400 scale pods are about 11mm x 8mm x 5mm. Converting that to 1/270 scale, we get pods that are 17mm x 12mm x 8mm, with a 5mm central horizontal box, and a 2.5mm middle vertical box. In real life these would be 4.48m wide, 3.2m deep, and 2m tall. That seems inefficiently small for an interplanetary modular freight system, but not ridiculous. Those dimensions are just slightly bigger than the cargo space of a 15′ box truck (a meter is 3.28 feet). Regardless of real world issues, as a sanity check, that lines up with drawings and other representations of the GR-75 and how it gets loaded.

A GR-75 being loaded.

A GR-75 being loaded.

Modeling

For a small project like this for 3D printing (as opposed to, say, laser cutting or injection molding), I’m a huge fan of TinkerCAD. It’s browser based, so unlike most CAD packages it works well on my Linux laptop. The interface is intuitive, and the feature set plenty for simple pieces. I was able to do a lot with it very quickly, and highly recommend the app. It’s free for non-commercial use, so you can try it out easily.

The first step in modeling the cargo pod was checking the overall dimensions, in case they needed to be fudged for gameplay or aesthetics. To start I made a base to exactly match the core set Container token. I wanted to keep that as the normative playing piece, with pods merely decoration. After making a box from the dimensions calculated above, I could see that it would be a reasonable size to put a couple on the base. In addition, I imported an X-Wing sized TIE Fighter model to see how the pod would look against a ship. It looks a bit small, but I think that’s an artifact of almost everyone picturing jet fighters and star fighters as much smaller than they are. This is especially true for the TIE Fighter, even setting aside FFG’s arguably upsized take on it.

Roughing out the dimensions with an appropriately sized box.

Roughing out the dimensions with an appropriately sized box.

From there I blocked out the basic shape, creating three boxes capturing the overall dimensions of the center box and wings. The same was done for a wing, and then the top and bottom of it replaced with a wedge.The sizes for all of these boxes, notably implicitly defining the angle of the wings, were taken directly from the scale calculations above. Of course, I only needed to model a single wing in detail. As they’re the same left and right, when it was all done I could just duplicate and mirror that side.

Breaking the overall shape up into the central box and side wings.

Breaking the overall shape up into the central box and side wings.

Deconstructing the wing into the middle box and two halves.

Deconstructing the wing into the middle box and two halves.

Replacing the top and bottom halves with wedges.

Replacing the top and bottom halves with wedges.

With the basic shape arranged, I made a checkpoint copy to keep in the background in case I decided to start over from this point, then started on the front pads. The center is simply a box slightly smaller than the center box itself. To make the side pad, I grouped the three components of the wing, duplicated the amalgam, shifted it forward, and scaled while maintaining aspect ratio. Both of these pads were sized and positioned to create a 0.5mm border around and between the pads.

The pads also stick out from the body 0.5mm, but they’re modeled 0.75mm deep and extend into the latter. A major issue in CAD system implementation and use is numerical precision. In particular, when shapes are combined to make a single solid, if two faces meet but are positioned apart by an infinitessimal decimal difference, the system may not realize they’re completely joined. It doesn’t typically matter much for this kind of casual modeling, the final printed piece would usually look the same either way. However, it could affect the efficiency of the print. It also quickly becomes an issue if you use a combined shape with such a gap as a hole to make a cut: You’ll be left with an extremely thin slice in the middle of the hole. I find this issue arises often in TinkerCAD, so whenever possible I extend parts into each other a bit to make absolutely clear that they should be a single solid when joined.

Another detail is that the 0.5mm visible pad depth is not an arbitrary value. Much below that and many home printers, including mine, would not have the resolution to be able to reliably produce the outline. Further, even if it could, the detail would be lost with all but a very careful paint job. The pads are also hanging in space, creating an overhang that might need external support to be printed. However, a 0.5mm overhang is easily managed by many or most slicers and printers. There’s little enough material that the overhanging region can be largely supported from the body.

Front pads made by copying the center box and wing, then scaling down and positioning.

Front pads made by copying the center box and wing, then scaling down and positioning.

A minute detail from the original piece, I then made very thin wedges to cut angles out of the corners of both pads. This is quickly done by making one wedge, then using the align and mirror tools to flip it into each corner. Those are then grouped together, switched to a hole, and grouped with the pad.

Wedges used as holes to cut corner angles into the front pads.

Wedges used as holes to cut corner angles into the front pads.

The recess on the wings could be made by scaling down the body similarly as the pads. However, a small tweak can be made to afford a critical difference. The front pad on the wing has a small border all around it. However, we can model the recess to only be on the top and bottom aspects. This is actually how it is on the FFG model: The side face of the wing body is aligned with the side extremity of the front and back ribs.

Modeling the recess this way is a significant boon to 3D printing the piece. By not recessing the side of the wing body, the side of the piece presents a completely flat plane. It’s also big enough to stand stably on the print platform. The piece can thus be rotated 90 degrees and printed on its side.

This is great news, because it entails no supports will be needed. If the piece were printed in its natural position, sitting upright, the wings would create an overhang requiring support. The issue is that the wings grow out to toward the sides at too shallow of an angle. The printer can’t print in thin air. Most start needing a support structure at anything shallower than a 45 degree overhang, and the wing rise is much less than that. Support structures are a pain to cut off or dissolve, assuming your printer even has the latter capability, so they’re best avoided whenever possible. They’re especially difficult to work on small pieces, and in this case the detail of the wing recess would be lost cutting out a same-material scaffold as required on a single-head fused deposition printer (the most common kind) on such a small piece.

Similarly, printing the piece on its front or back would risk losing the detail of the pads and their angle cuts. Although very small, the pads would create slight overhangs that might not be rendered as precisely. Even more likely, physical effects and common settings for the initial print layer(s) against the build plate, such as fatter and thicker material deposition, would probably cause the small recessed border around the pads and the detail of the angle cuts to be flattened, absorbed, or otherwise lost.

In contrast, by putting the piece on its flat side, no detail will be lost and the wing angles grow vertically very comfortably within printer tolerances. Combined with the point above about the front pad overhangs being kept well within tolerances, this means the piece can be printed without supports, and a whole mess of hassle and loss of detail avoided. As a bonus this mimics the original FFG piece as well, though it would otherwise be a tradeoff of printability versus accuracy well worth making anyway.

To preserve that flat side and create a solid print foundation with no supports needed, the wing body can’t be simply scaled down. Its body has to extend to the side extremity. So, rather than scaling, the original 3 piece wing construction was duplicated and ungrouped. The top and bottom wedges were then simply moved vertically toward the center, creating a border recess parallel to the top and bottom lines of the front and back ribs extending all the way to the side edge. The center box was then just downsized to this thinner space.

Similar to the pad, creating the wing recess by lowering the wedges and downsizing the middle box.

Similar to the pad, creating the wing recess by lowering the wedges and downsizing the middle box.

Next I added simple shapes above the top of the center box to give it texture, just like the FFG model. Another bit of minute detail is that the one circle appears slightly smaller relative to the other on the original model, and I kept that here. Like the pads, these details are again sized keeping in mind the capabilities of many home printers. Mine has a 0.5mm nozzle, which is fairly common. That means it more or less produces a 0.5mm wide path. It’ll try, but it can’t realistically and reliably print features below 1mm resolution, essentially a wall made by a path going out and back. So that’s my usual size threshold in making small details like this, the smallest circles and boxes are 1mm. That turns out to be fine though for throwing in vague details like these.

Once that was done I duplicated the front pads and full-size wing rib and shifted the copies to the rear. From there I grouped all the pieces of the wing, duplicated them, shifted them to the other side, and mirrored them.

Adding bits on top for texture.

Adding bits on top for texture.

Copying the pads and full size wing rib from the front to the back.

Copying the pads and full size wing rib from the front to the back.

Duplicating the wing to the other side.

Duplicating the wing to the other side.

The modeling of the piece is now essentially done. All that remains is to create a hole on the bottom for a flight stand peg to hold the pod off the base, and group everything together to form a single solid.

The hole is simply a cylinder center aligned on the central box, switched to a hole, and grouped in. One small note here about TinkerCAD is that it doesn’t have many convenience functions. For example, there’s no functionality to choose a reference for an align action or to lock one piece down for aligning against (the button to lock pieces unfortunately—oddly—also prevents it from being used to align). So, if you select two displaced objects and center them, they’ll both move. Assuming the moving piece is smaller, the pattern is therefore to first align the piece that can be moved against the far extremity of the piece you don’t want to move, and then center them. Since the moving piece is now within the extent of the larger piece, the latter won’t move. In the next picture, this means aligning the cylinder against the right edge of the body, and then centering it. If the moving piece is larger then you need to position it manually or craft a more elaborate temporary construction.

Centering a cylinder to become a hole for the stand peg.

Centering a cylinder to become a hole for the stand peg.

The hole grouped into the bottom of the center box.

The hole grouped into the bottom of the center box.

That’s it! The cargo pod is now done.

The completed GR-75 cargo pod.

The completed GR-75 cargo pod.

Printing

The next step is making a test print of the pod, base, and a simple flight stand peg. My printer is a Lulzbot Mini, which has been phenomenal to work with. Though I’m not an expert on current market offerings, it seems to strike a very good balance between cost, ease of use, reliability, print quality, print size, and time. An important observation is that it seems there are many printers now offering high enough resolution to print miniatures of acceptable quality. Some are even very low cost, down to ~$300. But it seems one of the biggest tradeoffs made in achieving that is that they print much more slowly. That’s probably fine to download and print parts, but in developing new parts from scratch could seriously slow down design iterations.

In any event, one of the cost tradeoffs made in the Mini is that it does not have an SD card reader and/or internal high level controller, it must have a computer connected to drive the print. So I use Lulzbot’s CURA distribution to slice objects into G-Code printer commands, and send that file to a Raspberry Pi running an Octoprint server which actually executes the job and can be monitored remotely.

Slicing the test print.

Slicing the test print.

Another logistical point is that I currently have my printer set up by a window, with fans to draw and push air out of the room and ventilate my workspace. Although there doesn’t seem to have been much study yet of health effects of 3D printers, ultimately fused deposition modeling is melting plastic to form a part. That typically creates toxic fumes, so I’ve been erring toward an abundance of caution as I use it heavily.

My current printer setup.

My current printer setup.

I’ve been exclusively using eSun HIPS filament for miniatures work, to great success. The resulting product has great resolution, is hard and strong, is easily cut and sanded, and takes paint great. A kilogram spool runs $24–40 on Amazon and can be shipped same day Prime. A part like the cargo pod and its base only uses literally a couple grams of material, so you can print an awful lot of miniatures bits per spool.

As referenced above, caveat upgrades, the Lulzbot Mini has a 0.5mm nozzle. After a fair bit of experimentation tuning settings for this kind of project, most of my prints are at 0.18mm layer height; 0.54mm bottom/top thickness; same initial layer thickness; 100% initial layer width; and 20% infill at 0.5mm shell or 10%, 15%, or 20% at 1mm shell. Those settings have struck a good balance between speed, quality, and strength, with very acceptable dimensional accuracy (mostly a challenge in the initial layers).

In the end, the first test print came out excellently! The part came out very cleanly and definitely looks like the cargo pods. The only changes made were to raise the top details from 0.25mm to 0.5mm tall so they’d not be lost in paint, and to increase the flight peg diameter to 3mm. I’d expected to have to do that, but was hoping in vain that the thinner 2mm would magically work. It looks good and would be perfectly fine for at-home play, but I need these pieces to work in a public event setting where they’re not being babied, so I had to accept the 2mm pole would be too easily snapped. I also ran the test with a separate flight stand peg so that in case it was useless, the base would still be useful somewhere. However, the final design integrates the peg and base to make a solid connection with no gluing required.

First print: Success!

First print: Success!

Conclusion

After that was just making a few bases with different numbers of flight pegs, and the project was all wrapped up. I now have a sweet 3D cargo supply container token that matches my beloved GR-75 in 1/270 scale, and have started printing out piles of them.

Again, these designs have been uploaded to Thingiverse as a free download. Drop a line if you make use of them, or have any questions about this walkthrough!

Final design mockup of a cluster of cargo pods; prints are made as one base piece (red) and a bunch of pods (orange) that fit onto the pegs.

Final design mockup of a cluster of cargo pods; prints are made as one base piece (red) and a bunch of pods (orange) that fit onto the pegs.

Print layout for a stand of 4.

Print layout for a stand of 4.

Printing an initial batch of tokens.

Printing an initial batch of tokens.

Cargo pods and their mothership under attack!

Cargo pods and their mothership under attack!

Supply depot.

Supply depot.

Extreme closeup. These parts have not been cut, trimmed, sanded, glued, or otherwise cleaned up in any way yet, this is straight off the printer just popping pods onto pegs.

Extreme closeup. These parts have not been cut, trimmed, sanded, glued, or otherwise cleaned up in any way yet, this is straight off the printer just popping pods onto pegs.

Molokh Gambit: Production Begins!

Very very late last night I started physical production for our Molokh Gambit 1-day X-Wing narrative campaign. Behold, a fleet of CSS-1 Corellian Star Shuttles appears!

CSS-1s and X-Wing escort.

CSS-1s and X-Wing escort.

By this evening I’ll have four of these sweet babies to hand over to Matt for painting. In the process I learned that the Senator’s Shuttle token from the X-Wing Miniatures core set is probably the most out-of-scale “model” in the game. I barely remember it from the prequels at all, but Wookieepedia tells me that the CSS-1 Corellian Star Shuttle is actually 80 meters long and can carry 200 passengers. So more of a cruiser than a shuttle. To be in scale with the other 1/270 standard ship models, the shuttle would have to be almost three times the size seen above. Even against the 1/400 Epic ships it’d have to be double this size. However, I think this version looks great and the size gives it better and simpler playability for 100pt missions as we’ll be using it.

Modeling

I did not create this model, I found a design Losik published on Thingiverse. Err404 also has a great version that embeds the model directly into the shuttle token. I thought hard about using that, but we’re planning to build a bunch of models for the campaign so I went with the flying version so it would fit in better. In the end all I did to the model was recut the base to have a blank top, created a thicker flight pole with matching slots on base and ship, and added a tab & slot to the two ship halves to guide better gluing.

Exploded view.

Exploded view.

I also realized that despite instructions, the front half could be printed laying down rather than on its end. Although this model is thick enough it would almost certainly print fine, and you can put more on the build plate by going vertical, I try to avoid tall structures. Laying it down also let me easily add the gluing tab.

I’ve posted these re-cut models to Thingiverse for free download.

Print layout.

Print layout.

Printing

A somewhat interesting realization was that the front half isn’t actually perfectly flat though. I could see this looking at the shading on the model in various viewers as it moved around, but you can see it very clearly by examining the somewhat degenerate first layer toolpath. The nose of the shuttle lifts up a bit, creating a weird shape for the initial layer. However, it’s literally just the first layer. Given that, I’d assume this is unintentional. If I had to guess I’d say it’s possible (I have no idea) that the model was originally ripped from a game and this is some artifact from the video-oriented modeling and mesh construction. The print is unaffected though and it would have been an effort for me to correct using my software at hand, so I did not bother to fix it.

Somewhat degenerate first layer; the bottom shape should be the hull front half.

Somewhat degenerate first layer; the bottom shape should be the hull front half.

A more interesting general note about printing is that originally I had a taller flight pole. Most of it printed fine. However, toward the end when it was the last component being printed on the layer, the printer hot end cycling around continuously made the top of the piece too hot, keeping the deposited plastic melted a bit and letting the motion swirl and gnarl it. You could fix this with a sacrificial tower pulling the hot end away long enough for the piece to cool. I did the same thing here though by just cutting the flight pole down to the same height as the engine stack. As long as you print them together, the printer will be pulled away from the flight pole long enough, as it goes to print the engines, that the pole will cool and retain its shape.

Printing in progress.

Printing in progress.

The Gambit!

That’s a good start to physical production for the event, with three months still to go. Colin and I had a long discussion on our way to and from NOVA earlier this month about basic squad construction rules and logistics, the outcomes of which are on the event webpage. Matt, Colin, and I have also started passing around a draft dungeon master’s guidebook with detailed proposals for the campaign mechanics that I’m excited about.

More to come; hope you can join us!

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Redcap’s August X-Wing Tournament

rebel-alliance-iconA couple PAGE people made it to Redcap’s X-Wing Tournament yesterday. Fourteen ruggedly handsome rogues, conspicuously clean jackboots, and marketably bizarre aliens came to fight in a very enjoyable event, with lots of interesting squadrons present.

Squadron

I took my new Kyle’s Bees squadron (100 points):

To be honest, the real goal here was just that I wanted to fly some B-Wings and the HWK, probably my two favorite Star Wars ships, after having spent a lot of time flying a YT1300+Y-Wings. The justifying theory though is that the B-Wings are robust, deliver a hard punch, and have solid initial maneuverability in a dogfight. They have barrel roll, 1-turns, and a 2-K, so they can fly. But they take a stress to use the moves, so they can’t really keep it up and can use some assistance to not cripple themselves in doing so. Kyle provides that by flying around generating a focus token to give a B-Wing each round, so they can barrel roll, stress, whatever, and still have a token to use. Meanwhile he also plunks away with the Blaster Turret, which is a solid weapon. The HWK is also fairly durable with its 2 Agility and the Hull Upgrade.

b-wing

kyle

Battle

So went the idea anyway. I’d gotten in one game with these against Matt but had not previously flown this against anybody else. Instead I played some solo games to learn the B-Wings and prep for this tournament. I actually enjoy that, and think it’s good practice. The trick is to choose which side you want to win and play it straight. For the other side you don’t set dials, instead responding reactively as ships activate, being able to see ships’ positions from the previous moves and with full knowledge of the as yet unresolved opposing dials. That’s a huge advantage and I usually lose… to myself.

So it wasn’t clear how solid this B-Wing list was, because I kept beating it with a basic TIEs+Carnor swarm. In addition, as they say: “Look, good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living? That’s something else.” So I was expecting to get clobbered.

Round 1

First game, Ryan G came at me with two TIE Bombers, Scourge, and an Inquisitor. The Bombers and Scourge huddled up in a corner while the Inquisitor came from table center. I started from the corner straight across from the Bombers but immediately flew toward the center and the Inquisitor. From Ryan’s perspective, he wanted to lure me into going against the Inquisitor so the others could joust at me. I didn’t want to joust straight at the Bombers and their Concussion Missiles, so I took the bait.

The Inquisitor though got overeager and came too fast. The Rebels delivered their initial punch and chased him back to the Emperor. In return, the Bombers got in a good strike with their initial missile volley. At this point I was worried, thinking about it in terms of the Bombers blowing away a ship a turn. Even with Extra Munitions though, they could only deliver that punch twice, and only if they got a good shot. The B-Wings were able to turn inside them, take out Scourge in the process, and then whittle away at the Bombers with Kyle acting as bait but also doing his share of damage.

Final outcome: Rebel victory, 100 to 44.

Hunting the Inquisitor.

Hunting the Inquisitor.

Round 2

Next up was Tony S, who literally lives down the street but we only manage to play at tournaments… He brought what I considered a pretty scary swarm of five Y-Wings with Autoblaster Turrets. I’m a big fan of Y-Wings so I knew how durable they are, and getting swarmed by that many Autoblasters isn’t going to go well for anybody.

I started in a corner and Tony basically arranged a line straight across from me. The only real strategic move I made was to again cut toward the center before engaging. I figured if I went straight at him I would definitely get wrapped by the swarm, whereas if I ran left the back of his line would maybe be stuck chasing me and out of turret range. I guess this sort of worked, but we still got stuck in a very messy furball.

From there the B-Wings’ maneuverability let me fly just well enough to never let all the Y-Wings get shots, so they could whittle down ships well but not eliminate them outright. This was a nail biter but leaning my way heading toward the end of time, with one B-Wing splashed versus two Y-Wings. Then, tragically, I got greedy with Kyle. With a hull point remaining, I should have just boosted away with a 3-bank red move to get him totally clear of the mess. I really wanted another shot, however, and he was low on focus so that stress would have been crippling to his continued utility. I thought I could get him just out of range of return fire with a 2-turn, but it came up just a millimeter or two short and he got blasted away. That was a 34 point loss and suddenly Tony was up. However, in the few remaining turns, the B-Wings were able to concentrate fire on one more Y-Wing and take it down, swinging me back just ahead as the game ended.

Final result: B-Wings barely hold the sky, 60 to 56.

IMG_20160827_135840

Facing the gun line.

Round 3

In a return to a tradition of ours, third round I faced Colin K and his Ghost + Tycho. I set up in a corner again and he put the Ghost across from me and Tycho diagonally. Unreasonably scared of the Ghost, I ran away from it and went for Tycho.

After that I got sloppy. Frazzled from the very hard fought battle with Tony, I made a bunch of basic mistakes. I managed to set up a solid barrage line against Tycho on the first run at him. But then I completely misgauged a 1-turn, jamming up all my B-Wings and only giving one of them a second shot at Tycho instead of all three.  Then I just happened to be standing exactly where I couldn’t see the stress token on that same misgauged B-Wing, forgot about it, and put down another red move. Colin of course immediately pushed it hard toward the board edge. Kyle got Tycho but the Ghost and deployed Attack Shuttle moved into close range and took out a B-Wing. Still not thinking well, figuring I was losing another ship flying off the board, I basically gave up at that point and made a useless move on the remaining B-Wing.

However, I was wrong again, and the ship both stayed on the board and survived a blast from the Ghost! From there I rallied mentally. Kyle and a B-Wing went after the Attack Shuttle, and Colin made his own mistake, forgetting to apply Zeb’s ability to cancel a crit that turned out to be a Direct Hit splashing it. The HWK then flew bait in a successful guessing game staying out of the Ghost’s primary arc and Autoblaster Turret range, while it and the two B-Wings did just enough long range shooting to drop the Ghost below half strength and score those points.

Final result: Old school Rebels beat those cartoon Rebels 74 to 22.

Bombing run on Tycho.

Bombing run on Tycho.

Round 4

That surprise victory forced a 4th round, as there were now two undefeated players. To finish the day I had to fight at the top table against Zac C and his fearsome squadron:

Unfortunately this was just a bad matchup all around on my end: Totally spent and unfocused from two hard & close games, starving and not expecting to play a 4th game, and facing a much more experienced player, with a setup I’d never considered before, which was easily capable of downing one of my ships a turn.

We more or less setup in opposite corners, and both started flying counter-clockwise around the board edges. I was hesitant to engage, but the Jumpmaster and Scyks split up a bit and I decided to swing in—sooner or later you have to fight! Unfortunately, I chose the wrong target. I went after the large ship, figuring that it’s not super robust, Manaroo passing tokens around was a problem, and it was closer. That just let the HLCs come in toward the rear of my squadron though, and I proceeded losing a ship each turn until the fairly short game ended.

Final result: Scum clobber Rebels, 100 to 0.

Blue Squadron swinging in.

Blue Squadron swinging in.

Outcomes

That total defeat dropped me to 5th place as the players who won a third game in Round 4 gained more points than I had. But I had to be happy with making it to that point, flying an untested list and not having played much this summer.

Also, I beat Colin, and that’s obviously all that matters.

It’s also worth noting that this was the top scoring Rebels list:

  1. Scum (Manaroo + 2x HLC Scyks)
  2. Imperial
  3. Scum
  4. Scum
  5. Rebel (Kyle + 3x B-Wings)
  6. Imperial (3x Defenders)
  7. Rebel
  8. Rebel
  9. Rebel (Ghost + Tycho)
  10. Rebel (Chewbacca + 2x Y-Wings)
  11. Rebel (5x Autoblaster Turret Y-Wings)
  12. Scum
  13. Imperial (Decimator + Firespray)
  14. Imperial (Inquisitor + Scourge + 2x Bombers)

There was actually a notable amount of diversity present among the lists, which is cool to see. No spam squads or cluster of net lists (though a few different ones at the top of the stack). Instead we got just a couple aces, one Triple Defender list, one solitary Ghost, and just a couple Jumpmasters, while a bunch of older ships reappeared—three squads had a YT1300, Y-Wings, and so on.

Colin thinking about it too hard.

Colin thinking about it too hard.

List Thoughts

Like I talked about for my previous tournament list, I place a lot of priority in squad building on simplicity and durability. I actually keep the cards for a slight variation on that Chewie list handy so I can lend them out for new players to try. Newcomer Nick actually borrowed it and flew to 10th place here in his first games with more than the starter box. There’s just a lot to be said for the basic structure both lists share:

  • Durability: A bunch of shields/hull points so you don’t have to fly perfect and never get tagged;
  • Firepower: A bucketful of straightforward shooting;
  • Ships: Enough ships to have options and robustness, not so many as to need fancy formation flying;
  • Trick: A single, simple special ability to augment that durability and firepower.

Beyond basic flying skills, the only special ability I have to work with in this list is Kyle’s focus management. I don’t have to remember Zeb’s infrequently used special ability, or debate spending my Concussion Missiles, or anything like that. A more nuanced list with a good pilot can probably tear this squad apart. But it’s relatively straightforward to fly, and targeted at beating trickier setups that aren’t executed perfectly.

One note about flying is that my standard flight pattern with this list has been to start from a corner, headed at a ~45 degree angle toward the center of the board. Theory is that lets me capitalize on the B-Wing’s maneuverability, spinning off to the left or the right or barrel rolling, and giving less maneuverable opponents a harder time coming at me through the asteroids. It’s quite a change from my Y-Wing list, which I generally literally fly in a box around the board edges.

Also, a sidenote: One of my dials slipped. I had noticed earlier in the day that it has somehow become very loose, and had seen the window moving a bit a few times when I picked it up. Heading into the first attack on Manaroo, it absolutely had a bank selected. Flipping it up to reveal though, it was straight. It didn’t affect that game, but would have been disastrous in other circumstances. I had not heard of that problem before. Definitely something I’ll have to think about how to fix and prevent.

Opposing Thoughts

I was glad to see TIE Bombers revitalized with the new Veterans box. I think they could be solid teamed up with a screening force to keep opponents at some distance.

The 5x Autoblaster Turret swarm is scary, though personally I’d probably drop one in order to put missiles or something on the ships. There’s not a huge difference between 4 vs 5 of them shooting, and in fact you’ll probably get the same number of shots on as you would otherwise, swarm dogfight dynamics being what they are. But having an opening salvo to give at a distance seems like it would be a useful addition.

I haven’t flown against a Ghost much, so it still catches me off guard. It seems big and scary and can definitely krump some ships with its firepower. But ultimately it’s fairly easy to whittle away. I was surprised here by how quickly it went down to half strength once I started really shooting at it. The Ghost doesn’t seem dramatically different in that regard from, say, a YT1300: Packs a good punch, is pretty durable against small jousters, but is quickly eaten up by concentrated heavy fire.

Attack on Manaroo.

Attack on Manaroo.

The Manaroo list is pretty good. I think it actually fits into my basic list structure:

  • Durability: The hull/shield points aren’t high, but agility is solid on all three ships;
  • Firepower: Each ship is regularly putting out 4 attack dice;
  • Ships: Three ships is very manageable to fly but not overly brittle;
  • Trick: Manaroo and the Attannii Mindlink ensure all 3 ships are equipped all the time with focus and evade tokens.

That setup seems a bit exotic and complex because of the number and variety of cards and pilots used, and relative rareness of some. But in practice it’s a single, simple, streamlined ability to execute: You just keep pumping out evade and focus tokens. In that way it’s like this Kyle setup, which is built on a bunch of card interactions but is very simple to play. The “1 trick” guideline isn’t about cards or the complexity of the squadron build, but simplicity and frequent use in play.

That said, I’d love to have another go at it. If I’d focused on the Scyks first and hustled in to engage them inside their turret range and take at least one out early, the battle could have gone very differently. Still tough, but hopefully not as lopsided.

Conclusion

Next up on the X-Wing radar for me is that Saturday, December 10, I’ll be leading a 1-day narrative campaign at Redcap’s. Though I don’t play X-Wing particularly competitively (this is only my third tournament), I’ve run and am running a bunch of innovative narrative events for 40k that have gone well, so hopefully this will be similarly fun. Matt and I have some crazy ideas, so I hope you’ll join us!