Astatine-209

I've scaled the model to the drum lacquered wedge plates, so it isn't minfig-scale, and can't fit minifigs. No landing gear either. Enough parts were left to make a nice stand. It's surprisingly dense, due to the mostly plate-based construction, and weighs almost half a kilogram. Some thoughts on the design process: I particularly like how I've made the engines . As per usual, the instructions and stud.io model can be found for free on rebrickable.

Finished! There honestly isn't anything to comment on in terms of building techniques. To get a wedge shape for the s foils, the plates form a simple triangle. The S-foils themselves aren't the firmest, and flop around a bit, unless constrained by continuously pushing the actuation assembly. Here's some photos: (As per usual, if you're interested in checking out the .io file, or the instructions, you can find them for free on Rebrickable)

WOW! This looks absolutely amazing! Using the tubes for the antennae is a great idea.

Awesome! I concur, this is a sick colour scheme.

Another X-wing, eh? Out of that? More miraculous things have been done with odd Lego sets, but compared to making an X-wing out of, say, the 10497 Galaxy Explorer - - this isn't going to be easy. No non-right-angle wedge plates plates means that the S foils will need to be build with plates locked at angles, increasing potential for gaps. (I've seen a really cool X-wing made out of the Saturn V set on rebrickable, were a lack of wedge plates is also an issue, but is tackled pretty well!) For now, I've designed the nose: The nose is held together in a basically the same way I did it on my last X wing MOC: (part colours changed for better visibility) I'm not sure about the black 'band' around the tip of the nose. Maybe I'll play around with recolouring the pieces. I'm pretty happy about the cockpit area. It holds it's shape well. For the S-foil mechanism, I'll go with the typical sheared parallelogram technique. The set has just enough pieces with technic holes for that.

Very smooth, very elegant! The brown accents are quite tasteful. I love how all of the wolfpack shields in your builds are placed flush with the walls.

This new photo still seems to be different - I put the colours side by side below: I actually don't know that much about photography myself, but maybe your display is old and has a shallow colour depth, so the pics would look the same to you. I don't know if there are camera settings which could improve colour accuracy. Maybe someone else can confirm that the colours are different so it doesn't look like I'm trolling or something .

Both the AeroDactyl and the Ankyl-biter look sick, I really like the elephant-y toes on the latter. Using that car fender piece for an ankylosaur's' head is pure genius, it looks so much like the real thing! Your photos look great, but goodness gracious, what is that colour ! Unless you made the reds purple-ish on purpose with the lighting, I'd recommend taking your photos and hue-shifting them back into the reds with a photo editor, like below.

Mamma-mia, a very creative idea with great execution! I like how all of the minifigure heads have differing print styles (even the two Exoforce heads are from different waves!).

This is about an older MOC I made, but I thought I could make a post about my design process. I decided that I would try and make something based on the Ranger spacecraft from Interstellar, using the Galaxy Explorer's pieces. What I ended up with is by no means an exact replica of the movie prop, but I still think it looks cool enough. I decided on using the big blue slopes to panel the front of the craft for that smooth look. I rotated the wings upward using the well known mirrored hypotenuse technique (which is actually also used in the main 10497 build!). I naively tried using the 3x6 wing elements for the shape of the main wings, but this wasn't working. The spacecraft was going to be too fat, and the wings too wide. So I started thinking about mounting them in more interesting ways. A steeper angle could perhaps work... I moved to building in Stud.io, and decided on using this: I made the next iteration of the model digitally. At this point, I wanted to have the outer airlock door slide down, like it does in the film. I was also using a single canopy for the cockpit, because I assumed two canopies side by side would look bad. I was also going to mount the canopy section at an angle, because I liked how it looked on the Galaxy Explorer build. This was making the build needlessly complicated, and slowed the process down. Shortly after this I realised that I should only rotate the wing edges, and keep the core flat. This would simplify gap-filling a lot. I burned out at this point. After a short hiatus, I decided that I would try placing the two canopy pieces side by side. After placing a 1x8 flat tile between them to hide the gap, I found that I really liked the look: For me, this was a breakthrough moment, and helped get me motivated to finish the project, which happened quite quickly after. I abandoned the idea of having a sliding docking port on the back, attached the two canopies to the body with a trapezoid linkage for access and made a stand for the whole thing. I also made sure it had a 'play feature' . (If you'd like to build this, the instructions are available for free on rebrickable.)

Well, I said I'd make a new post once it's approved, and that came much sooner than I expected! You can now get the instructions for free on Rebrickable.

Thanks! Thank you as well! The reason it's made out of two parts is because they move closer to each other when the mechanism is actuated. So a plate placed under the ingot piece could not help - the assemblies need to have a gap. Well, then I have good news for you! I've not only got the mechanism worked out, but I've also put together the instructions (it's actually buildable, a miracle!). I've already submitted them to Rebrickable, but their approval process usually takes ~3 days. Once it's approved, I'll add a post here. To accomplish this, I extracted the second white technic beam from the nose. The 'pusher' assembly now juts out a bit more, and whilst this may slightly detract from the looks, it improves playability. Although... "playability" It weighs 1 kg now, using 1098 parts.

This is very slick, especially the fact that you can look through it! Competition aside, have you tried putting in two identical scenes, side by side? I think it would create the illusion that the headset is using stereoscopy, when viewed from a few centimetres away, like real VR headsets!

I'm not sure if this post should've been posted in the Star Wars forums, and I apologise if I'm mistaken in posting it here. I've only seen 1 X-wing alt-build of the 10497 Galaxy explorer, that being the one designed by Clinton Matos (he has a blog post about it, it's pretty cool!). This surprised me, considering that the 10497 has the official X-wing canopy included, with quadruples of important engine parts. I decided to take a shot at it myself. I wanted to see if I could make a working S-foil mechanism with the Galaxy Explorer's pieces, as Clinton Matos' X-wing's foils have to be moved individually. I based the S-foil mechanism on set 75301, the 2021 play-scale X-wing. It's a very simple and elegant design, probably the best out of any official X-wing yet (even though the wings don't all rotate around the same central axis) and was quite easy to implement with the available technic parts (or so I thought). The S-foils are connected into parallelograms (red and blue), which are then sheared into the X shape by another assembly (highlighted green) being pushed downwards. After deciding on the mechanism, I designed the nose. I was inspired by pictures of BaufmanBricks' X-wing. The nose is too square to be accurate to the actual X-wing, but I think it looks decent on the "finished" model. I then built up the core section at the same time as the wings. This was by far the hardest part, as I kept running out of plates (and parts in general). Below is a render of the "finished" product. As far as I can tell, no illegal techniques were used. Finally, it was time to build it and test if the mechanism worked in real life, with the weight of those massive wings. After finding out that building it was almost impossible, and making some last changes, I could try it out. I actually suspected that this might happen, as the push rod (previously highlighted green) in the mechanism relies on clutch power to stay together. The problem lies in the fact that you push on the middle section, which transfers the force through stud connections, highlighted below with dotted green. I left it be, because I thought that I would be transferring the force tangentially to the stud connection, which wouldn't force it apart, i n t h e o r y. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Well. It broke and I'll have to fix it. I think I'll be able to replace the assembly with the two white technic beams included in the set. Unfortunately, one of them is used in the nose, where it's quite important for structural stability. Finally, here are some photos of the built model. I apologise for the relatively low quality pictures, I'm not getting the DSLR out for a broken moc. PS: This thing is HEAVY! I was quite surprised. According to Lego Studio it weighs almost 0.7 kg. I think it must be denser than the Galaxy Explorer. It's also swooshable, excepting the fact that the wings don't hold together. PPS: I built an astromech too.

Lorem ipsum... Ah, so this is how you embed images!