What is a MicroHangar?

That’s easy, it’s the most cheap and space efficient way to store your ships. No need to invest in plano cases, battle foam or other fancy but expensive storage solutions, all you need is a printer and some cardstock.

The MicroHangars are basically cardboard tuckboxes, measured to give the ships a tight fit to protect them. You can print as many as you like without wasting too much ink. After some cutting and glueing I promise that you’ll be amazed how well your ships are protected and organized by nothing more than a piece of paper. And the best part is that you save a lot of money and are able to buy more awesome games instead of investing into unsexy storage solutions.

The original idea for the MicroHangars came from BGG-User DarkPadawan in 2013 for X-Wing: Miniatures Game. When he left I checked with him and he allowed me to take his work and continue it for the sake of the community.

Some time after this Armada came out and I thought it would be cool to have MicroHangars for Armada, as well. So I took my caliper and started immediately after I got hold of the core game. I wanted the hangars to have some features in common with the X-Wing hangars and at the same time to be a little different. I used slightly alienated and desaturated artworks (with the “Armada blur”, which can be found all over the rule book) instead of the specs graphics (which wouldn’t be available for all Armada ships anyway) and the hangars open horizontally which I think is both cool and convenient especially when storing the larger ships.

Check out the tabs above to see more!

The ships

Here you can see the open MicroHangars for the three core game ships. Each ship is basically meant to be put into the hangars in normal position, sometimes at a slight angle. You can see that in the picture.

I did my best to design the VSD hangar in a way that the tiny antenna won’t suffer any strain, hence the considerably angled position of the VSD inside the hangar. Works perfect. Check it out in this really inferior video, where I throw my VSD around the table. After the release of wave 2 I had to come up with a new concept for the Imperial Class Star Destroyer. Since the result turned out to be really cool, I think I’ll revisit the Victory Class Star Destroyer again and see if I can make a similar hangar for it, too.

The squadrons

Each squadron get’s its own box but is meant to be put inside on its base. Each SquadronHangar comes in two version, a generic one and a named one including the pilot’s name and a depiction of the corresponding defense tokens. Despite the fact that all squadrons have different heights the SquadronHangars have a unified height, because otherwise you would spend precious life time searching for the one and only box for each squad when cleaning up the table. Nobody wants that. And this way you can stack them nicely into the game box, which happens to give room for exactly two SquadronHangars on top of each other. What a striking coincidence…

The ships

Those two new hangars for the Assault Frigate and the Gladiator Class are pretty straightforward, both ships fit in with ease. Note that the geometry of both hangars changed a bit since v1.0 to allow for a more natural position. Just in case you’re wondering why the most recent version doesn’t look the same as the old hangars.

The squadrons

The Firespray hangar raised a problem, because when stuck on its base the ship is slightly taller than the already established squadron hangar height. I ended up making two boxes for it, a smaller one for the sake of unity (you have to take the ship off the base) and a bigger one (where you can leave the ship on it’s base). Hope you’re all OK with this.

The ships

MC80: Check. Two cute baby starships: Check. And the Imperial Star Destroyer. This one really freaked me out even before getting it, I didn’t thought I’d be able to come up with a cardboard box for this monster. Guess what, I was wrong. Due to his size the ISD needed a more intricate hangar, but once you’re done it will be able to hold the ISD’s GearBox, as well! It’s really not that difficult to build, don’t be intimated by all the print sheets, just refer to the following instruction.

Building instructions ISD hangar

Introducing combo hangars

The hangars for the flotillas are a MicroHangar / Gearbox combo, meaning you should put the whole thing (ships on stand) into the hangar, along with all stuff from the GearBox. I thought this made sense, since a MicroHangar for the two little ships would really deserve the term “micro” and the little pins on the underside are quite fragile, so leaving them in place seems reasonable. Take a look at the pictures underneath to see how everything fits nicely, even without the dials flying around and possibly damaging ships with alternative paint schemes. If you like a MicroHangar/GearBox combo better or want to have a separate GearBox anyway please let me know, I’ll see what I can do!

Nooo! Standard hangars, please!

After quite a few inquiries about a separate MicroHangar/GearBox solution I had to revisit the wave 3 hangars. I decided not to build a hangar for two tiny flotillas alone, since the little plastic pin will most likely break apart when you try to detach the ships from their stand (I learned that the hard way…). And the hangar would have been ridiculously small anyway. Therefore I’ve designed a hangar that holds both flotilla ships on its stand. The rest of the stuff got its own GearBox.

Nothing special about the two hangars for the new MC-80 (yes, it has the same designation as the MC-80 from wave 2, not my fault) and the Interdictor Class Star Destroyer. Hangars are pretty straightforward, but I had to cut them quite a bit. Take a look at the picture to the left in case you have any difficulties when glueing the parts together.

The two sheets with reinforcements are totally optional, the hangars aren’t particular flimsy, but just in case you like them to be a little sturdier you can print and cut the additional reinforcements.

As you can see in this picture you should put the ships inside the hangar at an angle, they won’t fit otherwise. This is on purpose, the ships would rattle inside the hangar otherwise.