Warship Build Special — Fighters

One thing that you may have noticed in prior posts showing complete fleets, is that I have been adding fighter squadrons around the ships. Today, I’m showing you how I make those. Thus, let’s have a quick talk about making fighter formations for your display and gaming purposes.

This is what I consider your basic fighter build, and all of the other builds will develop from this one. As you may have read, my builds follow very specific scales, which I like to maintain to an extent. This means that single-seat fighters would be far too small to actually be portrayed in any detailed form. Thus I use a base with a Y-shaped plate atop a bar — this gives us a base that allows us to simulate a formation flight. The narrow part is thus the front, giving the formation an arrow shape that clearly indicates the heading.

Because at this scale the fighters are so small, you just use 1x1 round plates to simulate blips on the radar. Make sure to use the main color of your fleet so you know who they are on a game.

Bombers or corvette ships are usually larger and perform a different role in a battle fleet. Thus, I use a V-shaped plate at an angle to simulate those. In the Halo fleets, I also assume these to represent Longsword bombers.

Speaking of my Halo fleets, I also made a build for the Covenant Banshees. Because of the parts I use to represent these ships and to convey their alien-ness, I invert the direction of the base, with the front being the wide part. It’s a simple build that makes your fleets feel different. Just don’t get confused — the “tentacles” are the backside of the Banshee fighters.

Finally, maybe you don’t want to have fighters or “just” fighter-themed squadrons. You may want to have flying mechs! For this, I have a few more builds in store for you.

I will remind you here that the origin of these builds lies in the wargame Mobile Frame Zero, where the models are made of legos. In the Intercept Orbit (IO) version of the game, themed after space battles, players do have access to flying mechs as squadrons. These were the base inspirations for these fighter builds in general.

This is a simple squadron that uses few parts. They just give away the blocky shape of a mech and can use enough colors to imply your faction of choice. I have made several squadrons like this for my IO games, for example.

However, should you want something more elaborated and have the parts to produce it, I have an alternative for you, also based heavily on the instructions presented in the IO rulebook — really, go get it, it’s a wonderful little space-based wargame.

These are complex but look good on a table — albeit they are big, sometimes bigger than some of the warships I’ve made thus far. I will also add that you may have seen builds like this before. IO players and mini-scale Lego builders in general have been attempting to build the smallest mech possible for years, and at a certain scale there is so much you can do.

Hope you find these useful. As per usual, if you build these in real life let me know. I would love to see how your interpretations look like.