Starfield Build Theory: Making Your Own Junker Ship

 Making Your Own Junker Ship

Introduction

I was thinking that "Junker" builds don't necessarily have to be entirely scratch made. Perhaps you want to roleplay as a Junker type but it's just too much effort to build out an entire ship to do it. Well, while I've done that with earlier builds on my blog, just about any ship can be transformed into a Junker with minimal effort.

Most Junker ships would actually not be full builds like I made. Most would be the salvaged wrecks of vanilla ships that might have been repaired using non-standard parts. As in the title photo, you might take an Ecliptic Falcata and junk it up. The head canon can simply be that the captain of the vessel salvaged a very damaged Falcata (or the civilian equivalent) and pieced it back together with whatever parts were at hand.

 

Techniques

Junking up a vanilla ship is really quite easy. You can 

• Replace standard parts with parts from another manufacturer.
• Add extra parts purely for visual impact.
  
• Leave "holes" or gaps in the structure (as long as it doesn't impede the function of the vessel)
• Repaint a portion of the vessel to represent that the replacement parts might have come from another vessel or vessels. 

 Personally, I think it is best to use a combination of these techniques. In the Falcata above, I removed the Stroud Cowling from the Port side. I replaced it with three HopeTech Pipes - Mid and drop glitched both a Nova Bracer and Deimos Bracer into spot. Technically, there is no advantage to having both, but I think it looks neat. I also removed a 1x1 Hab and moved the He3 tank into its spot. That gave me room to drop a Deimos Tail into the spot between the engines.

Next, I replaced the Stroud 2x1 with a HopeTech 2x1. It doesn't matter what variant you set that to, but I chose a Control Station. It doesn't even have to be HopeTech. Nova Galactic would probably be the preferred "patchwork" manufacturer but any other manufacturer would work.

Getting close to the end of the line here, I moved the Missile Launcher and Ballistic Cannon over to the Horizon mount on the Port side. I also shuffled the Nova Radiator over to the top of the Nova Bracer. I left the Equipment plate in and placed the Shield right behind it.

Finally, I painted the areas around where I imagined the original ship was damaged at. This includes the replacement parts. Let your own taste and imagination rule the day here. I wanted to go for something a little bit tonally consistent, with a few outliers.

Another Example

Here we have a Crimson Fleet Phantom II. Spacers salvaged her from the Muphrid system and pieced her back together. Obviously she had sustained significant damage to the top and starboard sides and the spacers cobbled together some parts to get her moving again.

We replaced her Starboard Landing Gear with a similar equivalent from Nova Galactic. The bridge with a Nova Galactic cockpit. We put on a HopeTech docker and a shortened wing. We replaced the Landing Bay with the NG-6 Landing Bay and moved the NG-20 Landing Gear to just behind the bay. Finally we moved some of the weapons around. How you might have junked it up is entirely up to you. The part that makes it a Junker build is that it doesn't look like it comes from a factory. It should retain most of the general shape of the original vessel, but with junk parts. Changing it too much will essentially turn it into a custom build. That's perfectly okay too, but falls outside of the scope of this essay.

Once the skeleton is assembled, it was time to paint. I chose a patchwork of colors that look like a cross between a darkened vanilla Deimos with some Crimson Fleet. Again, go wild with your choice of colors. Junker ships are a patchwork of colors. I often desaturate colors a little to suggest a worn and used appearance.

Conclusion

This article was more of a tutorial than a full-fledged ship build. Functionally the Falcata and Phantom work precisely the same as if they were just captured . They just look like something salvaged and patched together. I can't imagine not being able to give the same treatment to any vanilla ship.