While watching the Dice Abide twitchcast last week, I was fortunate enough to win one of their fantastic prize giveaways, a Grasshopper light dropship from Dragon’s Rest designs and printed by PrinTerrain. (yes, that is a lot of links for an opener)
The Dice Abide team shipped it out quickly and I started messing with it as soon as it arrived. The kit is very modular with your typical ‘clip-system’ concept (though Dragon’s Rest makes their own clip sizes so it isn’t really cross compatible with other designers/publishers that use similar systems).
Using the minimum amount of clips necessary, I put most of the ship together and it is a pretty big model. They make an even larger one called the ‘Dragonfly’ but I think this size is pretty great for table terrain. The ever-eating Fat Yuan Yuan is going to stick around a bit for scale.
Since I plan on painting this up to go on my Infinity table and to be used in other games like Core Space, Stargrave, and Five Parsecs from Home, didn’t want to fully link up everything as I don’t want to break anything. The plan will be to wait for that until after I finish painting and sealing things. I will likely permanent glue some of the items that I would never take apart but the rest will stay with the clip-system.
Even though I liked the compact size, I wanted it a little longer. While I don’t have the actual STL kit, Dragon’s Rest does have this little corridor kit for free that I printed up. It happens to have the same connection layout as the fuselage and is not too big to just slap on.
The test printed up well and so I put it on the original and really liked the improvement with one caveat.
The corridor set is really just a set of top and bottom corridors and doesn’t do much to cover the outside. As such, you get a silly low spot in the ship fuselage now. This piece was never intended for this use so it is understandable but it won’t do for my purposes.
The kit does have this bottom piece but not having the STL file, I can’t really resize it to fit so time to fire up Fusion360 and remake it.
After an hour or so, I was able to recreate that design to fit my needs and send it to the printer.
It is always nice when the first test print turns out exactly as I hoped. I did a quick test fit and it worked great.
It isn’t perfect but doesn’t look so out of place with the flat low are anymore. It could have been a little taller to better match the other modules but I like that it isn’t 100% compatible. I like the idea of the ship getting upgraded throughout my campaigns and so it should look a little out of place.
I’ll start cleaning the model up and get it ready for some paint. In the meantime, Fat Yuan Yuan will keep on the nomnom. I big thanks again to the Dice Abide team. I really appreciate the model and look forward to showcasing it on the board.