3D Printing a Millennium Falcon Gaming Prop

3D Printing & Imaging Digital Fabrication Fun & Games Home

As I’ve written about here before, Make: contributor James Floyd Kelly has a game terrain modeling channel on YouTube called Game Terrain Engineering. Every week he releases new videos on the terrain and game component modeling projects that he’s been working on. So far, the builds have covered everything from fantasy RPG and skirmish games like Dungeons & Dragons and Frostgrave to the currently crazy-popular Mad Max-like car combat game, Gaslands and the new Star Wars: Legion miniatures game.

Jim has been very taken with Star Wars: Legion and has done a number of excellent videos on creating various terrain pieces to augment a Legion gaming table. Like many Star Wars fans, Jim is most taken with the spaceships of that sci-fi universe. There aren’t any to-scale spaceships in Star Wars: Legion (yet), but that’s not stopping makers from building their own. As Jim points out in the video, spaceships make awesome centerpieces to a gaming table, worthy objectives for game scenarios, convenient cover in a firefight, and they just look dang cool.

YouTube player

Already Jim has 3D printed and built a Legion-scaled A-Wing, Y-Wing, and U-Wing. But he wanted to try his hand at printing out perhaps the most iconic of all Star Wars spaceships, the Millennium Falcon. He found a Falcon model on Thingiverse, sliced it up into 14 pieces so that it would fit on his Prusa i3 MK2 printer, and set it to print. Over 100 painstaking hours later, he had his parts.

The result is a 5 pound, 32mm-scaled Millennium Falcon model. He joined the parts together with epoxy, filled and cleaned up the gaps, primed the model with filler primer, and then did some highlight painting and a weathering wash.

For those of us who love tabletop miniature wargaming, there is nothing more inspiring than a beautifully modeled terrain board with equally well-painted miniatures. And I can think of no other piece of table terrain more inspiring to Star Wars gamers (especially Rebel players) than a Millennium Falcon.

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Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.

View more articles by Gareth Branwyn

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