Post by Blacksnotling on Dec 14, 2002 20:10:20 GMT -5
from www.games-workshop.com/fanatic/sp_newsletter.asp#
Right folks, brace for impact. Despite the model and its two variants being covered in BFG magazine issue 12, the Endeavour will not be available to buy in the immediate future. Sorry. I can promise you absolutely that the Endeavour class cruiser will eventually be released, it’s a dead certainty, but as of now we really can’t say when that will be.
Okay, so that’s the brief version of events. I guess we rather owe all the BFG players an explanation for such a disappointing turn of events, so here it is.
The original Endeavour class light cruiser model was finished on time, passed on to the mould makers and put into the early stages of production in exactly the manner it should have been. What came back, however, was some rather poor quality castings, which bore a lot of defects like twisting and loss of detail which had arisen during the casting and moulding process.
At this point, these errors were corrected on the castings and used as new master models. Again, castings were made but turned out to be of a very disappointing quality. At this point, we believed that the errors were due to the shape of the Endeavour, perhaps making it difficult to mould or being too thin in places to prevent from twisting. With this in mind we continued to alter the ship’s design at different stages, reinforcing and thickening certain areas, believing that this would help it cast better.
After four or five repeated failures, despite our correction of every possible fault in the castings, it became obvious that the problem really must lie somewhere else. We returned to the original master model which Mark Bedford had made when designing the ship only to discover that it itself was damaged, probably due to heat and pressure conditions when it was cast for the very first time. In effect, every repair and correction we had been making had been on top of a fundamentally flawed original. Damn.
This led to the effective scrapping of the Endeavour, which you see in BFG magazine 12. At this point, in an increasingly desperate bid to get the model out on time, Mark Bedford valiantly began to make the model again from scratch, putting all his other work on hold to do so. In fact, we should have stopped at that point and took a long hard look at certain things - more of which later.
Instead, we perhaps rashly made the new design in a different style, attempting to avoid some of the problems of the last version. We made it into more pieces, divided the ship in different places and all those kind of measures. This, in hindsight, was something akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Our solutions, frankly, didn’t work, and for a sixth or seventh time, the returned castings were simply of an unacceptably poor quality.
So it was that through basically an inexplicable number of complications largely due to the curious vagaries of molten metal and silicon moulds, we reluctantly decided that the Endeavour is in no fit shape to be released. Many of the later problems we encountered with it stemmed from the fact we were making last minute repairs to try and meet our intended release date, when really we should have given up earlier and spent more time planning a real fix to the problem.
Which brings me back to the points this highlights. BFG ships have always been made in a certain way, with most ships having the same fairly typical selection of components - long bodies, separate, often plastic broadside weapons, multi-part rear ends and so on. It was pretty much a fluke, but making a ship the shape of the Endeavour in this means turned out to be a real problem. In fact, it’s a problem with a lot of the existing BFG ships too, but had never been to such a drastic extent that we felt we just couldn’t release it. Many of you, in fact, have bought BFG ships that required quite a bit of twisting and repairing in order to fit them together properly.
Right folks, brace for impact. Despite the model and its two variants being covered in BFG magazine issue 12, the Endeavour will not be available to buy in the immediate future. Sorry. I can promise you absolutely that the Endeavour class cruiser will eventually be released, it’s a dead certainty, but as of now we really can’t say when that will be.
Okay, so that’s the brief version of events. I guess we rather owe all the BFG players an explanation for such a disappointing turn of events, so here it is.
The original Endeavour class light cruiser model was finished on time, passed on to the mould makers and put into the early stages of production in exactly the manner it should have been. What came back, however, was some rather poor quality castings, which bore a lot of defects like twisting and loss of detail which had arisen during the casting and moulding process.
At this point, these errors were corrected on the castings and used as new master models. Again, castings were made but turned out to be of a very disappointing quality. At this point, we believed that the errors were due to the shape of the Endeavour, perhaps making it difficult to mould or being too thin in places to prevent from twisting. With this in mind we continued to alter the ship’s design at different stages, reinforcing and thickening certain areas, believing that this would help it cast better.
After four or five repeated failures, despite our correction of every possible fault in the castings, it became obvious that the problem really must lie somewhere else. We returned to the original master model which Mark Bedford had made when designing the ship only to discover that it itself was damaged, probably due to heat and pressure conditions when it was cast for the very first time. In effect, every repair and correction we had been making had been on top of a fundamentally flawed original. Damn.
This led to the effective scrapping of the Endeavour, which you see in BFG magazine 12. At this point, in an increasingly desperate bid to get the model out on time, Mark Bedford valiantly began to make the model again from scratch, putting all his other work on hold to do so. In fact, we should have stopped at that point and took a long hard look at certain things - more of which later.
Instead, we perhaps rashly made the new design in a different style, attempting to avoid some of the problems of the last version. We made it into more pieces, divided the ship in different places and all those kind of measures. This, in hindsight, was something akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Our solutions, frankly, didn’t work, and for a sixth or seventh time, the returned castings were simply of an unacceptably poor quality.
So it was that through basically an inexplicable number of complications largely due to the curious vagaries of molten metal and silicon moulds, we reluctantly decided that the Endeavour is in no fit shape to be released. Many of the later problems we encountered with it stemmed from the fact we were making last minute repairs to try and meet our intended release date, when really we should have given up earlier and spent more time planning a real fix to the problem.
Which brings me back to the points this highlights. BFG ships have always been made in a certain way, with most ships having the same fairly typical selection of components - long bodies, separate, often plastic broadside weapons, multi-part rear ends and so on. It was pretty much a fluke, but making a ship the shape of the Endeavour in this means turned out to be a real problem. In fact, it’s a problem with a lot of the existing BFG ships too, but had never been to such a drastic extent that we felt we just couldn’t release it. Many of you, in fact, have bought BFG ships that required quite a bit of twisting and repairing in order to fit them together properly.
