HiGame

Ever looked at your PC and thought: “Man, I wish this thing looked like a Star Destroyer, with integrated fiber optic lighting, a water-cooled GPU, and 3D printed detailing?” Enterprising custom PC builder Sander van der Velden, aka Asphiax, evidently did — and his new Venator-class Star Destroyer (dubbed the Yazi) is truly something to see.

The Yazi will be shown at CES this year, and while I haven’t been able to locate actual dimensions, it’s clear from photographs that this is no small mod. The frame and body are made from aluminum, while the greebles (the fine detail patterns added to the exterior to make the shape more visually interesting) are 3D printed. The ship contains more than 50 meters of fiber optic cabling, and the sides and bridges are wired to give the appearance of a functional spacecraft.



Here’s the hull, with greebles partially applied. The final version of the ship also includes the bow section, but it’s a purely cosmetic addition.



The hull, with greebles applied to both the dorsal plate as well as the sides.



Close-up of a greeble. In the original Star Wars movies, greebles were created by grabbing a variety of aircraft, tank, and spaceship models and borrowing parts from each of them. Nowadays, 3D rendering software can automatically generate and place greebles on 3D models without forcing the author to painstakingly create them piece by piece. 3D printing blends the two approaches and offers extraordinary levels of real-world detail with less painstaking, piece-by-piece assembly.



A vertical photo, looking down into the chassis. The GPU and motherboard can both be seen (the system requires a custom cooling loop, but Asphiax couldn’t mount it before shipping the hardware).



The cooling loop diagram. There’s a huge fan bank mounted at the front of the ship. There aren’t any good shots of the fans while mounted, but we can show you the radiator and fan assembly.



And finally, for reference purposes, a 3D render of a Venator-class Star Destroyer. This particular class was built before the iconic Imperial Star Destroyers of the first Star Wars trilogy and features an enormous hanger bay and twin bridge towers — one for directing the hundreds of starfighters the VSD could launch, and one for standard ship operations. Later Star Destroyers carried far fewer fighters, and the second bridge was eliminated from these designs.

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