Overview: Before You Build
Throughout your building, I suggest turning off auto-saves for manual ones. I place them in a separate file from completed projects so I can revert back to them if I ever need them. I also save before I make major changes to the ship (adding engines, working on the underside, before scaling).
I also have an extra ship on hand that I use to make extra details such as: engines, trench greebling, turret bases, etc.
Building star destroyers generally follows several steps:
Trench
Dagger Shape
Superstructure
Bridge
Underside
Engines
Superstructure Details (Optional)
Trench Details (Optional)
Framework
Scaling
Turret Bases
Turrets (Optional)
Internals
Testing & Final Touches
Optional details can cause your ship's block count to rise exponentially & cause your game to lag. They also have the side effect of increasing your build time drastically.
Building: Trench
The General shape of the hull is arguably the most important part of building a SD. Mess this up, and you end up with something like this:
The way to combat this is to have good reference material to look back to, have a general idea for the shape of the ship you're building, and to not get tunnel visioned when building.
When you start building a ship, begin by loading a size 0.25 glow block that we will use as the root block.
place a block in front of that, then mirror X (SHIFT + X).
build an edge on the side of the block we just placed.
NOTE: getting the width and height of these blocks may vary with the kind of star destroyer you're making, so dimensions may vary. You may want to redo this part several times to get it right.
Select the block and an edge then copy & paste the selection behind the edge.
Copy and paste until you get something like this:
NOTE: adding too many blocks & corners will cause your ship very bc intensive during later steps. Though you can go back and replace all the smaller corner 1's and 2's later. You should find a good balance between accuracy and utility. I generally go for around 15 - 20 (in this example the number is ~14), although it depends on how long you want your ship to be.
Next up is to rotate your copied selection across the Z axis (press Z), reduce the length, and place it behind the last block & corner.
Copy & Paste your selection until you get something similar to this:
NOTE: If your star destroyer has any indents in the hull, you should put them in now. Just place a long piece of hull that goes from root to the rear of the ship (to stop all of your hull being deleted when building), copy an edge & blank hull combo, delete, then place the selection.
After that, select half of your entire ship, save for the middle & root blocks. Copy this selection.
Mirror Y (SHIFT Y), half your grid size & height of your paste selection. Holding ALT, hover over the blank hull on said selection then let go. Place this in between the second edge & blank hull.
Select the first edge & blank hull, and fill the hole in the selection you previously made.
After that paste said selection in between the blank hull & edge as shown:
Copy & paste them until it reaches the far end of the trench.
Delete these extra edges and corners in the rear:
Fill in the hole at the rear end of the ship with a blank hull, then an edge that's half the width & length of the other edges.
Next up press view (the eye icon), go to - All Blocks - then select Edge, and then select all edges inside of the trench.
open the block menu (G), select the Crew Quarters Edge, then press: Transform All Selected Blocks
Some Star Destroyers have a second 'lip' inside of the trench.
At this point, I would recommend scaling up your ship by 200%. This is only if you built your ship smaller than the ships original size.
Building: Dagger Shape
If you upscaled your ship, you should make sure that the mirrors are correct. Select the blank hull that is in front of the root, open up the Mirrors menu, and press the buttons that have the x & y, with an arrow underneath them. These buttons set your desired mirrors to the selection, and can be helpful when they're offset for whatever reason.
A lot of this part is simply placing a plethora of corner 1's and corner 2's, trying to get the right dimensions. This part will have some trial and error, so don't be afraid to delete the corners and do it again. Holding down CTRL will automatically force the block you've selected to match the shape of the block you hover over, and save you a lot of time and effort.
Next up is to start placing corner 3's and edges on the rear of the ship.
Then filling in the gap between the edges and corner 1's.
You can then place Twisted Corner 1's underneath the Corner 3's.
Please note that the smaller corner 3 in the middle will need an extra edge to be flush with the rest of the rim.
Some Star Destroyers have rear armor plating that tapers off in the opposite direction of the rest of the hull, such as the Annihilator Battlecruiser:
Since we don't have a block that fills this part perfectly, we'll use a Corner 3 placed behind each corner 1.
This other angle on the annihilator is a little more complicated.
I'll leave a workshop link here that leads to an unfinished Annihilator hull for anyone to take a look at and see how some of the plating is done:
*Insert Link Here*
NOTE: This is all we're going to do for the engine/rear portion of the ship, and we'll come back to this in the 'Building: Engines' section of this guide.
Building: Plating & Superstructure
The techniques used for plating & superstructure are virtually the same. What we are doing is transforming the Corner 1's & 2's of the hull in to Crew Quarters & Blank Hull. Then we cover the CQ/BH with more Corner 1's & 2's. It might help if you color the hull before you start making any major changes.
Also note that most Star Destroyer superstructures are give or take half the length of the hull.
After coloring, the only thing left is to raise the hull to your desired height, recolor, & fill in any holes in the superstructure.
Each 'level' of the superstructure is just as tall, if not taller than the Edge Crew Quarters inside the trench.
Then make some final small adjustments to the hull.
Building: Bridge
Building: Underside
Building: Engines
Building: Superstructure Details (Optional)
Building: Trench Details (Optional)
Building: Armor & Framework
Building: Scaling & Extra Bits
At this point your ship should be almost complete. Most of the actual building is done, and all that is left is to merge and scale.
Building: Turret Bases
Turret bases are pretty straight-forward. Go around your ship & place turrets wherever you want them to be. You could also create a turret base templates to copy and paste. The reason we're doing this so late into the ship's development is so that the turrets sit perfectly inside of their bases. The only tip I have here is Edge Turret Bases are trash, because they won't align turrets to their base properly without hassle.
Building: Turrets (Optional)
Building: Internals
Testing & Final Touches
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2412334872
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