Tiny Homeworld Build 03 — Kushan Fleet Part 1

Frigates and small craft.

As previously said, this series is coming together at a good pace. The smaller models are somewhat easy to put together although they do present their own challenges. It is harder to imply smaller details and they sometimes have to be completly forgotten about. On the other hand, I may be able to complete all the 17 factions I want to make (and believe me, Homeworld has enough to fill all the slots).

With this said, after the secondary factions from the last two posts, I’ll now move on to the first half of the ships for the good guys of the original game. As always, ThatBroDad has been helping me a lot with my creative process, so check his own stuff right now — it’s quite incredible.

After learning that they were not originary from the burning deserts of Kharak, the Kushan people started preparing their epic voyage towards Hiigara, their Homeworld. However, such trek was full of perils and they were forced to adapt and create an arsenal of warships to defend themselves.

But prior to this, the Kushan had actually devised a series of designs of their own. These were simple, scouts, fighters, and corvettes. You can emulate most of these from the fighters I designed some time ago for scales like this. However, the Kushan did have some rather unique vessels. For the bomber, I came up with a simple model, essentially a base with some parts that somewhat look like said small craft.

I did something similar for the Light Corvette. As previously stated, I’m using an exponential scale for these builds, in which the more studs the models have the larger said models are compared to smaller ones. A two-stud long corvette would be about 30 meters long, while a 7 stud-long ship would be one kilometer long or larger.

Thus, the humble corvette is almost as long as the frigates I’ll show you in a while, but it makes for a model that is easier to manipulate, build, and recognize on the game table.

While the Kushan had the technological know-how to make their own small craft even before meeting other space-farign races, the encounters with larger combat ships came out as a shock. After fighting the Turanic Carrier and capturing a few Taiidan Frigates, they were able to reverse engineer some of this technology for their own use. These ships would still remain more primitive than their counterparts, but would be sturdy enough to become the backbone in the campaign to reclaim Hiigara.

The model uses just 9 parts plus the base and should be easy enough to put together.

As the voyage continued, contact with additional civilizations, namely the Bentusi, opened the way for the Kushan to continue to add advanced technologies to their designs. The Ion Beam Cannon was one of the most important of such advances, as they allowed a semblance of parity with the Taiidan. Nevertheless, the powerful gun needed an entire vessel dedicated to carry and fire it, leading to the development of the Ion Beam Frigate, another cornerstone of the Exile fleet.

Also very simple in design, this model requeres 10 parts plus the base.

With operations and the fleet itself expanding there was a need to introduce support ships to repair and refuel small craft on the field. Later, such needs would only grow, leading to the creation of vessels that almost competed with the Mothership in size and complexity, but early in the voyage it was felt that simply adapting the versatile frigate design would suffice. Thus, the Support Frigate was born.

This model uses only 8 parts, albeit some may be harder to come across.

In addition to these frigates, the Kushan also put in service Resource Controller vessels to oversee mining operations away from the Mothership. With these vessels resources could be gathered from many places at a time, in asteroids or gas clouds away from the main fleet. This helped with logistics, guaranteeing there would always be metal and fuel to build and maintain the different ship classes and their weaponry.

This model is slightly larger than the frigates, although I still count it as a light ship. Uses 12 parts plus the base.

But these are just the smaller ships available to the Kushan. As the Homeworld War progressed, they were forced to put in service larger vessels, like the Carrier you see in the preview pictures. Such ships will come in the second part of this post, so stay tuned.

The ship listings for the three factions you already saw are almost done too, just need some tweaking and a presentation text. Please be patient for just a little longer.

If you like stuff like this, please consider paying me a coffee, or check the RPG materials I’ve done across the Internet. Also, follow me for more updates as I am working on exciting stuff that hopefully will come together this year. Check my other lists, too!

Now, go out there play games and enjoy your lives!