Federation Commander

[MAtchstick808]

I see that there are two scales on shapeway. whats the best match for the 2400 line minis?

lastly Is shapeway going to be the norm for new releases? will metal minis be discontinued? I rather have metal over plastic and always thought plastic was a bit of a downgrade

[djdood]

Starline 2200, 2300, and the current 2400 have always been 1/3788-scale. The Shapeways 1/3788 minis are of course made to work with them.

1/3125-scale on Shapeways matches the Starline 2500 minis introduced for A Call to Arms Star Fleet (some folks use them with the other games).

The metal minis will continue to be made, as long as people buy them. However, the metal heavy war destroyers introduced last year didn't exactly inspire future introductions in metal (which have big upfront costs for molds, production runs, etc.).
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[Steve Cole]

It costs hundreds of dollars to put a new metal ship on the market, and there are no ships left that will sell 100+ copies to make it break even. The last 15 or 20 metal ships we did all lost money, a total of several thousand dollars. We love you guys, but the company doesn't survive on spending money to produce something 20 people will buy.

I should note that the 3788s were done by many sculptors over several decades, and for better or worse few of them paid much attention to what others had done. Some ships and empires were in the "everbody knows the scale is wrong" category. We're trying to fix what we can of that. It's also known that when Sandrine did the 2500s she (or Matthew) decided that some of the ships were just wrong and changed them and so sometimes the metal 2400s and 2500s don't match exactly. Only one of the Shapeways 3125s is a Mongoose 2500 (Vulture) and the others were done over from scratch by our current team. We've change some of the 2500 designs to better match the 2400s and some 2400s to better match 2500s.

So nobody gets to play a game and pull out a protractor and a mini and argue for changes to the firing arcs when his opponent pulls out a different mini of the same ship and gets a different arc.
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The Guy Who Designed Fed Commander