Tholian and FASA Gorn Ships: Star Trek starship parts kit expansion #9

[I’ve also posted these files to an alternative Google drive location. You can access that location here: <a href="https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xkXdFO4IwKOYczoLv9pBYE3Y6H8bhwub?usp=sharing">https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1xkXdFO4IwKOYczoLv9pBYE3Y6H8bhwub?usp=sharing</a&gt;]

Note: I’ve created a Patreon to support my modelling projects. If you’ve found my work useful, have the means, and would like to support my efforts, please give it a look. I will continue to release my designs for free on Cults 3D and Thingiverse, but Patreon members will get early access and in progress updates on my new projects, and it will serve as a central location for announcements. Thanks for reading!

This is the ninth expansion parts kit meant to complement my original Star
Trek Constitution Class Parts Kit,
providing parts and ship models to support the Gorn ships from the old FASA Star Trek role playing game, with the Tholian ship from the TOS episode “The Tholian Web” as a bonus.

See my Thingiverse Profile
for the full list of parts kits I’ve released so far. All parts are meant to be
cross-compatible between kits.

This kit supports the following FASA Orion ship classes:

This kit supports the following FASA Gorn ship classes:

• SS-3 Destroyer
• MA-12 Light Cruiser
• MD-8 Cruiser
• Vovossa Monitor
• BH-2 Battleship

It also supports the small Tholian Webslinger ship from TOS.

The FASA Star Trek RPG was
very popular among us older Star Trek fans who came of age in the '80s and '90s.
It lost its license to produce Star Trek in 1988, seemingly because Gene
Rodenberry, hot off of the success of TNG season 1, wanted to de-emphasize the
military aspect of Starfleet, despite the abundance of uniforms, ranks, and
50-megaton matter-antimatter warheads that all his shows were chocked full of.

FASA Trek provided a tremendous amount of background on a Trek universe that
was, in many ways, more realistic and interesting than what Rodenberry and
company wanted in TNG and later shows. Although much of this background has been
supplanted by later official canon, the ships from this game remain popular
among old-school fans.

Official Paramount/CBS has never given the Gorn much love in terms of ship design. FASA didn’t do too much better, only giving them a handful of designs for players to work with.

Notes on scaling and working with Blender

My target scale for all source files and output STL files is 1:1000. Although
these files have not been extensively tested through printing, they are intended
to be resized to match common modelling and miniatures scales.

Note that the Tholian ship is very small, so may be inappropriate for smaller scales

Blender is free, which to be honest was the
primary factor in my decision to learn it. There are many fine video and text
tutorials available online if you're interested in learning more. For a basic
tutorial on moving and joining objects in Blender(which should be the minimum
you need to know when working with these parts), see this instructables
tutorial. You
can use File -\> Import -\> Stl (.stl) and File -\> Export -\> Stl (.stl) to
load or save STL files in blender.

Note: These kits were built using Blender 2.8.

Post-processing STL output

Although all of the STL files included have been tested as valid watertight
meshes, joining the parts together and exporting new STL files can introduce
small errors that may cause issues with slicing programs. I recommend any STL
files you create are checked using a program like Netfabb Basic free
edition.
Doing a simple "Close All Holes" repair has fixed most of the issues I've run
into so far. If you do run into issues with mesh quality, please let me know.

Parts list

The following lists provide a summary of the included parts form all the zip
files. For the majority of items, the mesh origin has been set so that when you
import these objects into your 3D editor of choice, they are positioned as they
would be on the sample ships provided.
Note some of the ship designs have small weapons that may cause problems with
small scale prints, or be better handled in other ways in large-scale prints.
For these cases I’ve included a “no-canon” version of the parts and ship models
that removes these pieces.

Parts

Combined ship STLs

These files provide sample ships generated using the parts included in this kit.

Blender files

Blender files are included in the zip file: GornTholianBlenderFiles.zip

This file contains two blender files for each design: a parts file, containing the STL parts arranged as used in the sample ship designs, and a parts source file, containing the raw blender objects used to create the parts.

License

I'm releasing this under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. You're free to distribute and modify these files (even for commercial use), provided you attribute the creator and distribute your contributions under the same license.