Timeline of Shapeways

10 March: announcement of future store to do a few 2500s
11 March: Jean decides that we must have the Fed CA and Klingon D7 on the store on the first day and asks Mongoose to spin them up.
12 March: Will McCammon officially joins plans for expanded coverage although he had been part of the team for over a month.
4 April: Mongoose announces a delay due to the death of Sandrine's father.
DATE : Matthew Lawson joins the team with his library of Omega and other ships.
18 May: Mongoose drops out of the Shapeways project after finding that their existing CGIs would not convert to STL.
7 June: Steve Zamboni and his library of freighters join the team.
DATE : Gary Pollock joins the team to do Hydrans.
20 June: Store opens
24 June: Chris Nasipak joins the team to do Lyrans.
26 June: announced reschedule of Batch 2 to 11 July.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - 01:55 pm: Edit

THE ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT (ANNOTATED)

2500s ON SHAPEWAYS

We will begin releasing a few “print to order” ships on Shapeways. [OVER TIME THIS BECAME A LARGER PROJECT.] It will be the end of March [ACTUALLY 20 JUNE] before our store is open (we found out today we cannot get it open on Monday as we wanted), but we should have two or three new ships (including the long-awaited Vulture for 2500) on line by the early April [SIGH]. After that, we’re going to work very hard to add a new ship or two every month [NOW EXPECTED TO BE ABOUT 10 PER MONTH]. (The existing CGIs require tedious conversion work to go on Shapeways, so it won’t be an instant release of lots of ships.) [TURNED OUT MOST OF THE MONGOOSE CGIs COULD NOT BE PUT ON SHAPEWAYS AT ALL] We plan to include the missing 2500 dreadnoughts (Klingon B10 and C9, Kzinti DN [WHICH TURNED OUT NOT TO BE MISSING], Romulan Condor and Vulture) by the end of summer. They will be offered in both metal and plastic.

The costs of the various materials vary wildly from under $20 (the lowest printed plastic) to over $20,000 (platinum). We'll offer several choices, but until we get some samples in here we have no idea how "good" each choice is. On the other hand this is the only way you're going to get the missing once-resin dreadnoughts. [JEAN FOUND OUT THAT IF SHE INCLUDED ANY METAL CHOICES THEY ALL BECAME THE TOP OF THE MENU. SO SHE EXCLUDED METAL OPTIONS AND MAY ADD THEM LATER IN SEPARATE FILES.]

Watch for more news as it happens. We’re learning as we go [THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE CENTURY], so be patient.

We will be releasing some more 2500s in cast metal like the previous production. [TURNED OUT THE TWO HDWs WILL PROBABLY BE THE LAST 2500S AND THE LAST 2400S CAST IN METAL] Shapeways is just another venue for special ships. Give us ten years and I'm sure all of the ships will be there, but not this year. [WE'RE NOW THINKING FIVE YEARS, CAST METAL SHIPS MOVING TO SHAPEWAYS WHEN THE MOLDS BURN OUT.]

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - 02:03 pm: Edit

THINGS WE LEARNED

1. It took weeks to get samples, not hours.

2. The original plan and purpose was to just do the missing 2500 DNs which had never been converted from the failed resin casts. Will McCammon wanted to do some of his ships through the store and we decided to agree.

3. The Mongoose CGIs could not be translated into Shapeways except for the very simple Vulture. Ships must be designed from the start for Shapeways.

4. It worked better when creating new ship to do the 2400 (1/3788) first and scale it up to 2500 (3125). Scaling down the other way produced features too small for Shapeways to notice.

5. It seemed obvious that we could do endless variants of existing ships, at least until Will McCammon spent 30 minutes turning the D7B into the D6S and six hours failing to get the D6S to pass the Shapeways checks.

6. Not long after we started, Matthew Lawson (who does CGIs for our cover art) offered them for use in the store and noted that he had all of the Frax and all of the Omega ships ready to go. This changed everything about the project.

7. Not long after Matthew Lawson came on board and Mongoose walked away, Steve Cole noticed a breathtaking sculpt of the WYN dreadnought "Nancy" on the forum and brought Steve Zamboni and his library of 30 ships into the team.

8. As time went by, we noticed Gary Pollock doing Hydrans the Chris Nasipak doing Lyrans and they joined the team. By this point, Shapeways was no longer a minor project to do a few 2500s but a driving force and the future of all miniatures.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, June 27, 2017 - 02:14 pm: Edit

There is a dynamic hand-in-hand situation regarding ship selection. Here are some thoughts.

1. We want to start with just ships never available in 2500 or never available in 2400, plus a few selected others.

2. We don't want to kill metal sales by selling on Shapeways things we already have in metal. On the other hand, foreign customers prefer Shapeways since buying cast metal from ADB costs a lot in postage.

3. The sculptors are paid so much per ship up to a limit, so sculptors (assuming that sales will hit the limit) want to do more ships. Once we see sales data we may have to beg them to do low-selling variants we think we want.

4. We assumed that it would be easy to convert basic ships into variants. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. An easy variant means the sculptor gets paid for a new line-item; a difficult variant means he may be doing as much work as a new ship. Nobody today (27 June 2017) can predict what sales will be.

5. Just because a thing can be done doesn't mean is has to be done, or that it will make money.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, May 03, 2020 - 05:29 pm: Edit

B10 Kit Assembly Instructions