Imperial Snow Sled - 1/18 scale

Last Christmas, I gave this a start,
But soon before that day, I gave it away
This year, to save me from tears
I′ll give it to you as a special...


Thank Goodness you did not hear me sing this song.



Alright then. When I prepared a Xmas present for my boss last year I was stuck a bit. He is a big Star Wars fan and I had planned to give him a couple of figures. However, one of them, the Stormtrooper Commander, did not come with a suitable packaging and I did not want to just put it into a zip lock bag. So I had to come up with a nice and appropriate packaging idea.

The first was to put it into a box with a custom-made card in the style of the Hasbro Vintage Collection. That idea was good but not perfect. A box had to be found, a card created - much work for one figure and not much time left. I was thinking back and forth and found this idea a bit too haphazard and lazy.

I skipped the idea for later and decided to work on a suitable greeting card. I launched Gemini and gave it a picture of the two figures which were supposed to be displayed together:



Reason for this: Gemini is insanely good at creating visuals, but it is also insanely bad at scaling. I wanted it to display both figures in approxiamately the same scale, so I had to show it both figures together in one image. If I had shown it in two different images it might have scaled them wrong and made the droid too small (it knows that a droid is smaller than a trooper but not by how much). It is insanely dumb at enlarging an object which is too small later (it simply refuses to do it) so it is best to show it how big the figures are in the first place.

Then I asked it to create a festive Xmas card featuring these figures:



Well. It took my request a little too literal and displayed the droid still carded. However, it showed something interesting: He put the Trooper inside a sled, in Imperial style and with Imperial reindeer droids. This triggered something. The droids were cool and could be built using the eggs from "kinder Überraschung". The sled looked really cool and I decided to build upon it.

Next I asked it to delete the reindeers, unpack the R2 droid and put it into the sled instead:



That was absolutely insane! Gemini even used the bubble from the card as a windshield!

Now I had an idea and pushed this to the limit.

The sled as of itself was neat - but it resembled too much the way I decorated the AT-AT a few years ago.

So I asked it to nix the Xmas decoration and focus on the sled design.



Whoah! That was mind-boggling! Especially the red one was interesting. A few prompts later and I got this:



which led me to THIS:



DANG - that was cool! I decided to go with this and proceeded with the design. Stay tuned!

Then I asked it to display the model without figures on a plain blue background as seen as in vitage toy catalogues:



Since the design was set I needed some orthos to work with. Again, Gemini gave me something:



Not perfect but enough for me to fire up SketchUp:



With the basic shape set it was time to revise the droid compartment. The hood still looked more like a Xmas sled and was not very aerodynamic, so it had to go. Like this:





The compartment is multifunctional: It is able to hold a droid and can be replaced with a different plug for various purposes. A quick research on sled and skids gave me the info that two pairs of skids make a vehicle faster, more stable and safer in rough terrain. So I kept that idea. Even if I did not tell Gemini that it took that into consideration. Good tool.

But of course!

I especially liked the seat Gemini came up with:



Unfortunately I had to cut down the back rest because the trooper wears a grenade on his back. I had to make sure that he was able to sit properly. The overall design did not suffer from that though.

I wondered how I could make the colours work on the final template. I chose Gemini to do the job and give me some orthos with plain colours to pick from:



Then I asked it to give me a direct centered view at the lights:



This was perfect to cut out the light including the reflections inside the clear parts to create the texture for the model:



The model was cleaned up, unfolded and textured in CorelDraw.

The project started on December 6th, and on December 18th it was finally printing time!



You can already imagine the pressure on me. Dispatch day was December 23rd, so there was no margin for error. To save time I skipped adding flaps to the template and marked the areas which I thought would need them. I took a picture of each page to remember the positions when I had the time to add them to the parts in Corel.

I started with the engines. You know how much I like assembling tubes... Thank Goodness there are not too many of them.



The main body assembly is a bit different from what you might expect. Usually you would assemble a big block and the engine tubes separately. However, this time both components are fused together. This was done for two reasons:

1) Assembly was faster.
2) You will not get any gaps between the main body and the engine tubes. No matter how accurate you will build them - if they are separate, you will always see a gap. I wanted to avoid that.

The seat area including the inner and outer shell:



Necessary flaps were added on-the-fly:



The droid compartment:



Please note the hole in the middle. This was done to enable you to insert the droid without removing the center foot. That way you can put the droid in and out faster and do not run into the danger of losing the leg.



Compartment installed:



The seat area is glued to the outer hull step by step:



The droid cover:



The back side is black so that you don't see any white areas when you look inside.



Cover completed.

The hood:



The first nose box:



Note: The box was heavily altered in the course of assembly, so the final version will look different.

And everything loosely put together to see if everything fits:



YAY! There is enough space for the trooper and the droid! Success!

Yes, you have enough space for greebling and enhancing the panel lines!

Next I tackled the skids. They are assembled ver traditionally. Due to the flatness of them it is easier to insert some corrugated card for stability rather than adding a skeleton:



The skid mounts are very stable and much to my surprise nothing warped! Of course you may choose to add some card inside. If you dare.

Several parts have to be laminated to 1mm card:



Despite the height correction the seat still looks VERY neat and practical:



Sorry for the blurry pic; I took it late at night under very bad lighting conditions. The second one is sharper but ugly because of the flash. Ah well.

I had to cut the sheel open again to insert a stabilizer on-the-fly:



This was improvised to save time (reminder: we have December 21st, two days till dispatch!). The final model will have a proper skeletion piece.

After closing everything up again the base looked like this:



As if nothing ever happened, and the trooper will sit securely without sagging later-on.

Next we revisit the nose piece. I noticed that the first unfold was not good. I separated the front lights from the center block, thinking it would be easier to assemble them that way. However, the back plate where the front lights were supposed to be attached to the nose block proved to be unstable. The parts shifted and could not be controlled which would have caused a wonky result. So I went back to the drawing board and fused the lights and nose together into one solid block with no way of shifting pieces:



I was afraid this unfold would be too difficult but much to my surprise everyhing went together very well. It is the most difficult part of the kit (in fact I think it is the most difficult part I have created since the back halves of the Colonial Blaster) but if you work your way through one step at a time you will succeed.



A much simpler piece is attached to the bottom.



I added a crude piece of corrugated card before closing. The final kit will have a proper skeleton. The part is as solid as a rock.







All main parts are glued together.

December 22nd - time for the detail parts.



The foot rests for the vehicle.



Test fit of the skids:



Perfect! The skids are attached:



The parts for the thruster tips:



The front lights:



The guns are flat pieces (because of time constraints) but they look the part:



Then I was thinking of where the trooper would put his gun wile driving. Well, he would put it into a gun tray:

The foot rests are cleaned up using coloured paper strips, exactly like the edges of the AT-ST were cleaned up:



The steering:



Gemini gave me the control graphics. And yes - I had an accident when I was cutting out the laminated parts. I cut into my index finger and almost sliced off a good portion of the tip. It was held in place only on a 3mm wide area of skin. Fortunately I did not hit any major blood vessels, the bleeding stopped almost instantaneously. However, I still feel the spot, 5 weeks later...