[BSBA Cat A] [NOT AN ENTRY!!!] Interceptor

[icm]

I'm glad you like that ship.  I took it apart after about a week, but I've thought about rebuilding it.  What do you think of the Galaxy Explorer?

[leafan]

4 minutes ago, icm said:

I'm glad you like that ship.  I took it apart after about a week, but I've thought about rebuilding it.  What do you think of the Galaxy Explorer?

It looks good, but honestly I can't really relate to it because it's not a physical thing that I can see.

One picture looks like you've part built it but that's incomplete so I'd reserve judgement.

I hope you don't take that as criticism, it's just that I have a hard time connecting to LDD pictures which is why I would rarely vote for them on Ideas, for example.

One thing I did notice is that it has a lovely curve piece above the front 2 windscreens which I find appealing.

Sorry if I've missed something you said to clarify anything but I haven't read all of the posts, I'm just reacting to the pictures I see and the brief paragraphs above them.

[icm]

Fair enough.  I got the previous version partly built, but it turned out to be poorly balanced when landed.  I started to redesign it to correct the center of mass location and took the occasion to refine the design in a lot of other ways.  That's a feature I would really like to see in digital building programs: a center of mass marker for the entire build and individual center of mass markers for assemblies and subassemblies.  That seems like it ought to be easy to implement: it's just a bunch of addition, multiplication, and division of part masses and locations, not anything more complicated like stress and stability analysis or kinematic simulation.  The only hard part would be defining the center of mass of each part as a property.  Now I'm getting off topic, so I'll stop.

[danth]

1 hour ago, icm said:

Here's another revision of my updated Galaxy Explorer.

I like it. Very clean design! 

[icm]

Glad you like it!  How do you think it could be improved?  By the way, I don't remember if I commented in your thread or not, but I'm really impressed by how well you were able to recreate Starfleet Voyager with just a few copies of 70841 and 70821.  I am almost persuaded to buy several more copies myself for that purpose.

[danth]

On 1/28/2019 at 5:36 PM, icm said:

Glad you like it!  How do you think it could be improved?  By the way, I don't remember if I commented in your thread or not, but I'm really impressed by how well you were able to recreate Starfleet Voyager with just a few copies of 70841 and 70821.  I am almost persuaded to buy several more copies myself for that purpose.

Thanks! Although using 3 copies of 2 different sets is basically cheating...

I'm not sure how to improve your design without drifting further from the original set. I might like your 2018 iteration slightly more now that I looked at all of them. I think I prefer the slightly curved top of the 2018 version over the flatter recent version.

Edited January 30, 2019 by danth

[Digger of Bricks]

On 1/28/2019 at 5:33 PM, icm said:

Here's another revision of my updated Galaxy Explorer.  There are three main goals: preserve the wing and cabin dimensions of the original, keep the lines clean and the build simple, and fit as much cargo as possible.  The interior features a set of folding gates between the cockpit and the front cargo area, another set of gates between the front cargo area and the rear cargo area, removable racks in the rear cargo area from which to hang tools, and a door on either side of the front cargo area to allow access to the cargo from the wing without having to open any of the four large rear hatches (top, bottom, left, right).  Fully loaded, the ship can hold four 3x4 crates and six 2x2 crates, or two rovers, or a rover and a light trailer loaded with one 3x4 crate, or a rover and a heavy trailer loaded with two 3x4 crates.  I've got a lot of ideas for builds to go with this, but of course there's not enough time to bring them all to fruition.  Please comment and critique.  As always, more pictures are on Flickr. 

 

Pretty slick! Has a nice balance of studded and non-studded surfaces, and I like how clean the wing-mounted side thrusters turned out!  

P.S. My only suggestion would be to add those signature dual prongs to the nose of the craft in some way. 

[icm]

@danth I agree, the curved roof of the last version looks better from some angles.  It also raises the height of the rear fuselage by one plate, which makes it easier to fit things like loaded trailers into the cargo bay.

@Digger of Bricks  The previous version had a nice smooth cockpit hatch, but the top hatch over the cargo bay was messy despite my attempts to give it a smooth surface.  Moving the front of the cockpit forward two studs let me lengthen the cargo bay, which in turn made the hatch a lot simpler and improved the studded/smooth balance.

[icm]

I'm not sure whether this fits best in Sci-Fi, Creator, or even City, but here's tonight's build.  I look at 31066 and say: Spaceship! Moonbase! Rover!  If Lego released as separate sets a space shuttle similar to the 31066 A model, a Moonbase similar to the 31066 B model, and a rover similar to the 31066 C model, I would buy one copy of each.  Since 31066 is a 3-in-1 set and its base and rover are clearly sub-optimal alt builds of the shuttle, I've only bought the one copy.  Another reason to stick with only one copy of 31066 is possible overlap with this summer's City space sets, which have a Moonbase and rover.  But what if I combined two copies of 31066?  If one copy is only good for a Moonbase of B-model quality, would two copies let me build a Moonbase of A-model quality?  After a few hours on Studio, I'd say no - the result is maybe a B+.  Here's a picture anyway; again, there are more pictures on Flickr.  Has anyone reading this post managed to build a good Moonbase from two or three copies of 31066 without using any parts from other kits?

 

[icm]

Tonight's build is an updated 924 Space Transporter.  It's built around two of the spaceship bases in 70821 Emmett and Benny's Build and Fix Workshop.  Those aren't in Studio yet, so I had to approximate them as subassemblies, but that's easy to fix if and when I ever Bricklink the parts for the ship.  The cockpit is mostly copied straight from my Galaxy Explorer, just like the cockpit of 924 is mostly copied straight from 928.  The forklift is recolored and slightly modified from 60036 Cargo Train.  More pictures on Flickr.  Comments and criticism welcomed.

 

 

 

Edited February 2, 2019 by icm
"70821 base" assembly was wrong, so I fixed it.

[danth]

Awesome!

I think the clean look is better on the smaller ships like this one. For larger ships, you need something to break up the larger surface areas. 

Does that trans yellow side window piece/panel exist as a real piece?

[icm]

Yes, the transparent yellow window panel is real.  I restrict my digital builds to real part/color combinations and try to use modern parts wherever possible.  Unfortunately, this panel hasn't been released in that color since the 1980s.  I'd rather use 1x2x2 panels in transparent yellow, but they don't exist.

[icm]

BUMP!

The contest "Benny's Spaceship Building Academy" sounds like a lot of fun, but I don't have any good ideas for it right now.  As I interpret the prompt, it's basically this: put yourself in the shoes of a kid who gets a set that's really pretty good in its own right, but who really just wants a zippy shoot-em-up spaceship.  Pretend you're that kid and turn that set into the kind of spaceship you wanted, instead of the set you got.  When I was a kid, I got the 7470 Space Shuttle Discovery set.  It was a great model of a Space Shuttle, but it wasn't very swooshable for play and it wasn't built for minifigures, so it was only with difficulty that I could fit the astronaut minifigure I begged off a friend behind the windshield.  For a while, I had the Shuttle carry a little speeder inside the cargo bay and deploy the speeder to chase bad guys, but after a while that grew so cumbersome that I just tore down the set and rebuilt it into a starfighter (with a few extra parts from other sets).  This real-life backstory fits the spirit of the Benny contest, and I'm still pretty proud of the build, so I'm posting it here for your comments and criticism without actually entering the contest.  Is that OK?