I think there's probably a big legal difference between trying to defend your intellectual property from someone else profiting from it and saying 'No, we did not freely distribute the complete model and sanction its use by external parties' and 'yes, we gave the complete models out for free and told everyone they can do what they like with it'. And corporate lawyers are not known for saying 'sure yeah, let's take the risk now!'. Like you say: FD are not going to send in the lawyers over us knocking something up for fun via backwards engineering GPU captures, but do need to protect their IP and potentially preserve future revenue, and that means that I don't think FD will hand us completed patterns and tell us to go wild.
Yes, that was pretty much what I was getting at. They aren't making it "easy" for us to use the models for printing, but they aren't interested in stopping us either as long as we stay reasonable about it as it does increase interest in the game.
Imagine if FD did look to making a deal with Airfix to sell proper models. Imagine how much less Airfix would be interested in the deal if FD had already released their full 3D ship patterns and half the target audience had already made a plastic ship model.
With regards to the larger models, there would definitely be a market for full ship kits but that would probably require quite a bit of investment for a very small market. The issue with 3D printing is that the costs become prohibitively high when you get beyond around 2-3 inches in size, which is around $20-30 or so depending on the material, but since the printing is volume-based it gets exponentially higher as you scale up (rather than being discounted). This is part of the reason why I print the ships at a very small scale, I can print an Anaconda at 3-inch scale for around $20-30 and fighters at 0.5-1 inch scale for $8-10 which are reasonable costs if you want a small "fleet" of ships. If you scale them up larger to around 5-6 inch size however that would be over $100 per ship. Making a kit that uses parts produced more economically would decrease this cost substantially but the initial costs and production difficultes are limiting here. Developing a proper "kit" is quite difficult and making plastic polystyrene master molds for a model kit are quite expensive (upwards of $10k to $20k to development the stainless steel mold) although once you've done this you get substantial economies of scale as the production cost per kit can drop quite low when producted in larger numbers. The other option is a polyurethane resin kit but resins are rather challenging to work with without a lot of experience due to the vaccum-casting process that produces bubbles and other defects not to mention the resin itself is quite toxic and you need to know what you're doing. When Games workshop switched their pewter molds to resin they had a ridiculously high defect rate within the first 1-2 years and they really had no idea how to produce a high-quality resin cast for several years, despite being probably the largest gaming company and potentially being able to use experience from their Forgeworld subsidiary who had been doing high-quality resin casts for years.
Thank you for pointing me to RenderDoc. I can confirm it works with that but it is not quite as easy as you make it sound to get it working with ED. I just tried.
Yes it does require a certain amount of technical knowledge to follow the instructions in the video. If I hadn't already had a bit of experience printing Wing Commander ships I probably wouldn't have even tried, but I already had Blender/Meshlab as well as Process Explorer installed so I wasn't starting from scratch and it was just a matter of getting the Python script for CSV import and a few other technical issues.
The ASP on thingverse seems to be extracted with that tool and is not 3d print ready. I checked the mesh and yes you will have to put a significant effort into it to fix the mesh to get it printable. ( we all love those non manifold complains )
Yes both the Asp, Imperial Courier and Adder low-res models are "fragmented" although if you look at the original RenderDoc mesh output the verticies are still present and the mesh is intact if repaired, it's really just the faces and edges that are "missing". I was able to "reconstruct" most of the mesh for these but the quality was still poor and that was just with a low-res HUD model. Additionally some of the newer ships seem to have been done more "hastily" for example the Viper IV mesh is very poor quality with a lot of non-mainifold edges. That's just with the low-res HUD models that are usually a single "file", it gets even more complicated if you try to use the full ship models. The high-res full ship models are usually in several "parts" that overlap to allow moving parts on the ships in-game, such as hardpoint doors, cockpit interiors, etc., and those are very difficult to "reconstruct". The best way to get those ships is from the loading screen where your ship spins around on the screen as it is the only object to "capture" and you can often get them as a single coherent model that way. I quickly found that the full-res ships however have detail that is too fine to work with for 3D printing so have stuck with the low-res models. Even then I usually have to delete small details like thruster nozzles, thicken wings/fins and other thin walls and so on just to get even the low-res model within printing tolerances.
I prefer buying an official print ready 3d model from FD and support them that way but when it is not offered it is not offered.
Given that their initial 3D models take a lot of time to produce even just as an in-game 3D asset much less one designed for 3D printing they really don't have the time or expertise to make them printable as it takes many hours just to get it to a state where the 3D printer will accept the file. I think we will never see them offered "officially" due to this issues other than possibly a single iconic ship like a Cobra if FD really feels like testing the market with a relatively limited investment.
. it's around 1/200 th scale based on some card model templates I printed out, still needs a bit of work though 
