Image: Head on

Image: Rear view

Image: Overhead

Image: Insignia

Image: Bow view

Image: Sensor details

by Joonas Helminen

Stars! is a turn based space strategy game published by Empire Interactive. It's an old game so the graphics are quite basic, ship icons are 64x64 pixels and leave a lot to the imagination. I've built smaller models of the destroyer (my favorite ship) so I have a good picture in my head of everything you don't see on the icon in the game.

I decided to build a larger model for the Yellow contest, it's 14 cm long (5.5 inches) and 9 cm wide (3.5 inches). It's built out of 1mm styrene sheet with 0.25mm styrene sheet for the armor plating, styrene rods and some electrical wiring for piping. There isn't much on the model that's not scratch built, a few pieces of warhammer 40,000 bits, a piece from a 1:72 UH-1 Huey kit and some pearls.

To paint the model I used games workshop paints with codex grey as a base after I primed the model with chaos black. I highlighted the armor panels with codex grey mixed with a bit of skull white. I used boltgun metal for the metallic bits and sunburst yellow for the yellow panel. The race icon is chaos black / scab red.

To qualify for the contest I decided early on that this particular ship would be from a fleet with a yellow insignia. I tried out several different ideas in ms paint over a rough sketch of the model, to see what would look good. I didn't want to go too far away from a rough combat ship feel and after deciding that the ship number was to be opposite the race icon I figured why not have the fleet color as a background for the ship number. I tried a few different ideas, again not wanting to go too far off the rough feel I wanted for the ship, and ended up with what you see here.

So there you have it, Carvanoid Empire's Destroyer #72 of the First Assault Fleet, designated "yellow".