Amarillo Design Bureau Shapeways Store

[Scotchyn]

This went live yesterday:

https://www.shapeways.com/shops/amarill ... bureau-inc

[el gato]

this is both neat,
and a harbinger.
If ADB decides to remove other options, that'd be unfortunate.
surely, there's enough space in the internets for all those trekoptions hehe.

Not to say that they would, but ADB has a vested interest in ensuring there are no other Trek-related options out there. No other options in their current form, any way. ADB paid for their license (if rumors are true, then they paid dearly). Others have not. That's a competitive disadvantage as far as ADB is concerned. The only two ways to level the playing field are either to ensure everyone also pays for their license or no one pays for a license. Paramount would not tolerate the latter. That leaves you with only one option.

[jkb-1]

ADB has put out Gunboats! These are small starships, the rulebook says 35m, so in 1/3125 or 1/3788 they would be just over or just under a centimeter, but they decided to make the individual minis larger -- smaller than the smallest "real" starship above them, but bigger than the shuttle/fighter minis. They settled on 1.6cm, which makes them 1/2187.5, or we could declare the ships to be 40m long and 1/2500! I will continue to hope for the slightly smaller true 1/2500ths, mainly to be printed without the mounting bracket.



The larger Lyran Gunboat mini next to six gunboats (a Patrol Flotilla) on a 1/3788 PF Tender.
(The outermost gunboats are top and bottom of the wing: if you look closely at the port one you can see the forward prong of the bottom one.)

The Federation one really sells the idea of a small starship rather than a large shuttle:




Here next to a Long-Range Shuttle, Runabout, and Erewhon-class personnel transport:


Klingon 88m Bird of Prey next to their gunboat (upside down to show its engines):


Romulan gunboat next to the next smallest mini: 1/3788 metal Snipe (above it a 1/3788 War Eagle, the size and shape of a 1/2500 Snipe):


There is a sister ship to the Eagle, the Hawk. Round2's Cadet BIrd of Prey is about the size and shape of the Hawk, narrower than we thought the Bird of Prey was in the '70s. Modified to carry three gunboats, it becomes the Chickenhawk:

Actually, it lands on tripod gear I imagine arranged like the Eagle's, two in front and one in back. It would be easiest to adapt those accessways to lead to the gunboats, but that would mean putting them on bottom, and it would seem physics would not allow the Chickenhawk to land with them docked but the rules do. Running the access "foyer" up another deck to docking points on top would require a notch in the fin, or total removal of it.


PS: Sometime in the last month or so my Firefox updated to drop ftp support. That's what I've been using to put pix in the account I've been using since I got on the Internet. I found a program that works for now, but the time may be coming to look for another way. Any photosite recommendations?