The Ebon Hawk

The Ebon Hawk is the protagonist's ship through both of the truly excellent Knights of the Old Republic games. It is your method of travel throughout the galaxy, safe-haven and home.

It's obvious that Bioware chose the name to reflect that this was the Millennium Falcon of its day and whilst the Falcon is a great ship I would have to say that the Hawk felt like 'my' ship; a testament to great characters and storytelling.

I'd been looking to create a model of the Ebon Hawk for quite a while but could not find a method of extracting the mesh from the game. An industrious Anonymous-person managed to provide the mesh and textures and I set to the task pretty much immediately. Before I could "paperise" the mesh I first had to do a fair amount of clean-up work on the turret mount, landing gear and other miscellaneous small parts of the model that had intersecting polygons. In addition, because the computer model is effectively hollow and is not made of a plant-based medium, considerable thought had to be given to where and how much reinforcement could be added.

Most of the model is built from 165GSM* and 220GSM card with a few pins glued inside the landing-gear struts for strength. It's fairly sturdy though the port and starboard guns and top-turret barrels need to be handled with care (if at all), in retrospect I should have added reinforcement to them as well.

Still, I'm very happy with how it turned out given that I pretty much was figuring it out as I went along and it was a fun month and a bit in the building. I'm working on preparing the template and instructions so that others can build this and will find a location from which it can be downloaded.



*Grammes per square metre, I do not know the imperial equivalents unfortunately.


EDIT: Better photo