Trade Fleet for Terraforming Mars - Colonies expansion

The trade fleets that come with the Colonies expansion are basic shapes - an arrow, with a spot for a cube (the white arrow in the picture).

I may bundle more ship types into this project, sometime in the future - you may want to tag this as watched.

Update 2018.12.19 - added the fighter type trade fleet (yellow). The original was the orange shuttle type.
 

Update May 2022 - added the “Hauler” style ship. Designed using Blender 3.1.2, with No Man's Sky motif. Printed with a .25mm nozzle, I did go back and thicken a possible problem wall to .5mm - I'd still recommend looking at the model in “layer” mode in your slicer before printing.

How I Designed This

Designed in Blender 2.79, I based the prototype ship on a shuttle I had seen in No Man's Sky. It was just too big though - I squished the ship top to bottom and reduced the nose length. It kept the rest of the detail though, so that was great.

I have some other space ships I'm modeling as alternatives, but...they haven't turned out as well as I would have liked. (If you want to see more types, send me a direct message with a ship style you'd like to see, and I'll see what I can do.)

The fighter-style is similar to things in No Man's Sky as well. The original fighter was about 1.5x the size of the final product. I've been building them big, cutting out the cube section, printing them, and then going back to shrink them. (I typically re-cut the cube section each time, as it takes maybe 30 seconds to do...but modifying around the cube cut can be messy, and taking a lot more time to fix afterward.)

The finals usually have more details added to them as well - making the nose more of a bulge towards the tip, pulling out the "windshield", redesigning the thrusters to look more interesting...