Star Destroyer

youmagine

I wanted to create something fun for my students that would show them how to build something beyond the limits of our printer. To do this, I started with a hull design based on a University of Sydney drawing I found in Google images. The drawing had clean lines and was easy to measure with a ruler, so I decided to print it out at 1:1 scale on 11x17 paper. I then loaded the design into Cura and rotated it to a 45-degree angle before hitting the max button to get the largest possible width. The hull was printed in black PLA using the normal print option with support touching the build plate, which was necessary for the two deflector shield generators on top of the bridge and some of the laser turrets on the hull. After 26 hours, I used a ruler to measure the size of the completed hull's nose and then scaled down the nose design in SketchUp to match the hull. This took another 11 hours, after which the nose was ready to be glued onto the hull. Next, I designed the engines and printed them using the same scaling method to ensure they fit perfectly on the bottom of the hull. However, I encountered a problem when printing the engines - they were slightly too tall by 2mm. To fix this, I went back and reduced the height of the tail by 2mm before re-printing the engines. This time, everything came out fine after just 8 hours. My print settings included layer thickness at .1, shell thickness at .8, retraction enabled, bottom/top thickness at .8, fill density at 10%, and a print speed of 50mm/s with a .4 nozzle. The support was set to touch the build plate.