Design Update
Torso Plate Redesign
As I was perusing some bookmarked threads for tips and tricks on building legacy armor, I happened to stumble upon a magnificent strategy to tackling the age old issue of spacing and uniformity.
Ronan's Thread showed this amazing setup, so I bent his ear a bit on how it was setup, and figured out a few of the issues he had - and began to engineer ways around that. After that was done, I put together the following redesigns, that would still hold true to my original thought, but would be more uniform, and ultimately easier to arrange. So thanks to Ronan for being such an ingenious inventor for this system.
Usually these designs would be more polished on the computer, but Photoshop has been having a fit lately (I think because it's still CS2) and I may need to find a suitable replacement soon. But after putting this together, I printed out a mini template as one sheet and cut it out. Thankfully a good friend of mine had purchased a Lego Jango figure for my Birthday, so I did have something to test it out on.
I went ahead and made a full size paper template, and then transferred that to a cardboard cut-out. I found that if I do a simple curve on the collarplate, it'll clear my head, but it will lift off of the shoulders quite a bit. So either I'm going to need to add some padding so it has some full support, or I'm going to tack on Sintra to both the bottom and the top so it's more reinforced and it could potentially form into larger shoulder guards. This Saturday I'm heading to my second armor party, and hopefully I'll be able to make more progress on that front. I've also been contemplating adding trauma plates to my front torso plates, though likely only the top chest, so the others can still layer and slide as needed.
Paint Scheme Ideas
The CorSec symbol. At least that is the largest one I could find on the net. Thankfully it's a fairly easy shape to reproduce. I think I'm going to half that and situate each half on either side of my chest, with the diamond in the middle. A Shapeways store is willing to print up a diamond for me that has the Corellian symbol on it, so I may go with that as a the diamond, or just style it myself. My Mando is a Corellian after all (
see bloodstripes).
Cape and Shoulder Design.
So I have the fabric for my cape, that was the easy part, now I needed to actually construct a template. I was using visual images from the Assassin's Creed games, because I like how the cape fell in most of those cases, however I didn't want one that would wrap around my arm - because slapstick comedy would ensue knowing how badly uncoordinated I am. So I took another Mando's method and I'm going to have a slot installed on my backplate that will allow the shoulder cape to slide through keeping it in place. Below is the pattern I've chosen. The top part wraps over the right shoulder and will fasten somewhere, the rest will folded on itself into a layered look down the back.
Shoulder Design.
This one is a little bit tricky. My original desire is to have my left shoulder bulked up and my right shoulder left simple. The reason for this is movement based only, as I want to have access to reach up and behind me with my right hand for a future installation of a weapon mount. The left can be more bulky. So for my left shoulder, I'm thinking of something a big bigger, and I came up with the following.
I'll likely be putting more sintra in layers on it, but it's also just a very fluid concept at the moment. I've got a lot of work ahead of me, but I'm starting to see more and more of this come together as the weeks go by.
Updated Checklist
- Helmet - Needs Painted
- Flight Suit - Needs Tailored
- Vest - Needs Tailored
- Armor Plates - Partially molded/Other parts in design phase
- Gauntlets - Cut PVC
- Girth Belt - Design Phase
- Cape - Created Pattern
- Boots - Obtained
- Gloves - Obtained
- Kama - Obtained Fabric
