Here is the thing pieced apart for you guys who are going to want to custom work. I can take more pics if you need and explain in detail if you have any questions.

Looks like you could also be prying city blocks off that centre city structure

Yes you can they are clipped in sections. Also the bridge just pulls out.

when the realization hit you spent 200 real dollars for a few slabs of plastic

14 hours ago, Blail Blerg said:

when the realization hit you spent 200 real dollars for a few slabs of plastic

A few slabs of pretty plastic

On 8/3/2019 at 8:35 AM, fistfulofforce said:

Also the bridge just pulls out.

Which bit/how much of it actually comes out; where is the join? I'm looking at storage/transportation options and the bridge is my main concern; if I could take it out and store separately that would make it much easier.

So potentially a silly question and possibly covered in another thread, but was it difficult to disassemble the top and bottom shell? Is there any glue or just clips? How do you disengage the clips...just pry and push/lever them with a small flat-head?

Oh no....there are twelve screws you have to get to as well as clips along the whole way.

8 hours ago, fistfulofforce said:

Oh no....there are twelve screws you have to get to as well as clips along the whole way.

Any chance you could circle, in Photoshop or the like, where the screws are located?

Any chance of getting a video on how to pull it apart? I tried the other day and decided to stop because I wasn't sure how to get certain sections off and I did not want to break it

59 minutes ago, Kylemcph240 said:

Any chance of getting a video on how to pull it apart? I tried the other day and decided to stop because I wasn't sure how to get certain sections off and I did not want to break it

If you have about a week's worth of patience, I'm going to be doing another youtube series on lighting up the SSD, and part 1 is always disassembling.

28 minutes ago, Khyros said:

If you have about a week's worth of patience, I'm going to be doing another youtube series on lighting up the SSD, and part 1 is always disassembling.

Ooh looking forward to seeing that... 👍

Stealing a screen grab from @Crabbok 's unboxing video (because I forgot to take pictures of the underside before I started tearing it apart), I circled the 12 screw locations.

Starting at the front of the ship, there's an insert that has tabs on the left/right side of the ship.
The next two also have the tabs at the left/right side.
The two right before the engines are front/back tabs.
There is a tab facing the front of the ship for all 4 engine sets.
The entire center area of the ship with the 3 big engines easily comes out via tabs once the front half of the ship is removed.
And the rearmost one has tabs left/right.

I found the easiest way to disengage the tabs and free the covers is to slide your hobby knife down 10mm or so such that it disengages one tab (but not too far or you'll poke through the top side of the ship). Then grab a pair of vice grips to tightly hold onto the blade (take the handle part off), and quickly rip it straight out. Once I figured this out (on my 4th one), the remaining covers all came out with ease and no damage to the ship (the first 3 have very very minor damage as I worked the knife around prying it out). The triple engines I recommend just leveraging and popping them out, and the dual slide your knife down and disengage the tab.

Once that is all opened, you still have a ton of stuff to disassemble the city center, but it's all straight forward. Having screws though and gaining access to them is a brand new thing for the SSD.

How much room would you say there is on the inside? I was hoping to use a bigger powersouce like a 9 volt battery would that fit inside?

3 hours ago, Kylemcph240 said:

How much room would you say there is on the inside? I was hoping to use a bigger powersouce like a 9 volt battery would that fit inside?

Depends on where you want to put it. There are places where I'm having to remove materials just to make space for the bundles of FOs. But then there's the centerish area that's relatively open. My question when people talk about 9V batteries is always the same - how do you plan on changing/charging it?

good point. I was only planning on doing the engines I am not nearly brave enough to do running lights. What powersource would you suggest? Also how much soldering is necessary for said powersource?

Do a usb.

I am likely going to put the battery(ies?) Under the base(s) as has become normal for my Armada ships. And those batteries are 3.7V drone batteries, but require quite a bit of soldering.

If you were to go with an internal battery, I would recommend a rechargeable battery such that you can seal the ship up and just have a usb port showing. In this case, I would probably recommend one of those cell phone battery backups, though it will still take some soldering to complete your circuit.

5 hours ago, Khyros said:

I am likely going to put the battery(ies?) Under the base(s) as has become normal for my Armada ships. And those batteries are 3.7V drone batteries, but require quite a bit of soldering.

If you were to go with an internal battery, I would recommend a rechargeable battery such that you can seal the ship up and just have a usb port showing. In this case, I would probably recommend one of those cell phone battery backups, though it will still take some soldering to complete your circuit.

And to explain the thought of multiple batteries...

The max size I can fit under a base is a 1000mAh 3.7V drone battery. There are 13 engines, so 13 red LEDs. Each one pulls 20mA, so they will pull a total of 260mA. Which means if there are no other lights, the battery will last 4 hours powering the engines. Not bad, but I don't know how many LEDs I'm going to have for the fiber optics. My preliminary estimate is around 10 LEDs to power the fiber optics. Which means that the largest single battery will only last for just over 2 hours - not even a full game. That's unacceptable to me ;). So what I'm thinking is making two unique circuits, one for the engines, and one for the fiber optics, and having a battery under each base to power those circuits, which should give me more like 4-5 hours of play time on those batteries.

Alternatively, there's more space inside the ship, I could put a larger battery in the ship. But as I'm looking at how much space there actually is, and forward thinking to how many strands of fiber optics, and wires and LEDs, that space is going to very quickly get used up. Putting a battery in there is going to be a really tight fit with everything else.

@fistfulofforce + Khyros:

I tried to disassemble the super star destroyer as described by Khyros, but to no avail. The plates just don't want to come off. Before I accidentally damage my modell, can you explain the way you disassembled your modell in more detail?

On 8/9/2019 at 11:09 AM, Laminidas said:

@fistfulofforce + Khyros:

I tried to disassemble the super star destroyer as described by Khyros, but to no avail. The plates just don't want to come off. Before I accidentally damage my modell, can you explain the way you disassembled your modell in more detail?

Just for you, I did a quick download from my phone and grabbed a clip just for that. Sorry for the watermark, I figured doing it from my computer would be easier than my phone, but now I remember why I do it all from the phone...

3 hours ago, Khyros said:

Just for you, I did a quick download from my phone and grabbed a clip just for that. Sorry for the watermark, I figured doing it from my computer would be easier than my phone, but now I remember why I do it all from the phone...

...

Wow, great video - nice and to the point.

On 8/16/2019 at 2:21 AM, Khyros said:

Just for you, I did a quick download from my phone and grabbed a clip just for that. Sorry for the watermark, I figured doing it from my computer would be easier than my phone, but now I remember why I do it all from the phone...

Don't worry about the watermarks. Your clip greatly helps understanding how to remove those covers. Many thanks! 👍

After I succeeded removing the first two covers I noticed that there are hooks at the shorter sides of the covers holding them in place. Basically you need to cut off those hooks to loosen and remove those covers.

So I think it's enough to only cut into the gaps at the shorter sides. No need to possibly damage your precious model.

On 8/3/2019 at 9:08 AM, Blail Blerg said:

when the realization hit you spent 200 real dollars for a few slabs of plastic

Nah, you've paid for a few slabs of plastic and all the work that went in to designing both the model and the game mechanics.