(More pictures, click on this image to see.)

This one is a bit of a letdown after the Death Star. This one still needs a lot of work to refine. Then again, the X-Wing is the result of me making it a score years. Mind you, I wasn't making each one trying to refine it. It's just random thing.

The TIE fighter is different. I looked online for some how-to pages on how to make it and didn't like how it turned out. I set out to make my own and started with the hexagonal 'wings.' The how-to pages I found just eyeballed the wings, and I couldn't get them to turn out right.

I'm not to complain without trying to figure out a way to fix things, and this is no different. I set out to design my own model. This one took a week to develop to this point, and I'm not extremely impressed with it. I'd like the wing strut to be much narrower and the cupola to be larger. Also, this one requires so many back-and-forth folds on the center that the paper along that crease is too weak to hold a fold, and often is too weak to hold together.

Still, the wings are hexagons by design. The basic form is a 'Tootsie Roll' fold, where the paper is effectively rolled into a hexagonal cylinder, then twisted to form the strut.

Let's talk the details. This one starts with an 8.5" x 11" (US Letter sized) paper, folded into eighths with two of the sections overlapping to form the hexagonal cylinder. I have to make a lot of prefolds to get the hexagon to fan out properly, and the photos show the wing still 'dishes' out -- it's not flat.

I think one takes appx an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-quarter, but I'm still devising/revising it as I go. I can't see doing it faster than 45 minutes. This one has a cupola. Previous ones just had a 'catseye' middle, sort of like the TNG Enterprise's secondary hull. As I said, I'm still revising and devising it. I may get the struts narrower still.

This one, I think I'll rate at 50%. It gets the point across, but it's not detailed enough to identify signature features. Then again, a TIE fighter is a pretty simple shape (from a prop point of view) so it has only a few signature features: hexagonal wings, round cabin, and narrow struts between wing and cabin. That's it, and they're all pretty hard to do.

As for the 50%, I think that's not being too harsh. I just created this model from scratch, so I'm pretty proud of it. The Death Star is based on a known polyhedron -- I just had to add the skin and the top / bottom domes. This one was 100% from scratch. I only developed it a week ago, too. I'm sure it'll improve with time. I just need to make it a few (dozen? hundred?) more times.