BBC Topic!

Look at me, I made a MOC!

Since the CCBS characters came out, I've been wanting to build a to-scale ship for some of them. Lego's finally doing it with the speeder bike this summer, but that's a pretty small vehicle; I want a huge TIE Fighter and a massive XWing piloted by Vader and Poe, or something like that. The idea is doable, but a bit out of my price range at the moment.

When this contest rolled around, I thought it would be a good opportunity to do this scaled down. My first thought was to make a TIE fighter. I'd build a frame for the wings out of CCBS bone pieces and then fill it out with HF shells and other black panels. (And I guess try to avoid using too many plates and stuff, 'cause system.) But then I'd have to also design a cockpit that could hold a CCBS character. The only one I have that would fit would be Vader, so I thought I'd shrink him down, but then I didn't have access to the parts I needed and I didn't have enough panels or shells and it looked like this idea was going to flop.

Then on a whim I tried to design a mini Boba Fett, thinking that his ship would be a bit easier to make. It works out because Slave I has a lot of dark green and dark red in it (well, the official sets do) and those are colors that are abundant in Bionicle elements. For Boba, I had good success with a small head made system bricks. Since I didn't have the technic pieces in sand green or sand blue, I decided to stick with gray and green based off the classic minifig design. His body is a condensed block of technic elements that kinda worked out, but overall he didn't exceed the 25/75 system to technic ratio, so I knew if I wanted to enter him, he'd have to come with a ship.

I'm fairly pleased with how Slave 1 turned out. It's stable and can stand on it's own... although the bottom / back is exposed and a bit messy, but that's rarely going to be on the display side. The red section is not quite as solid or shapely as the real thing, but it has a certain "Bionicle" flavor to it IMO, and it's still recognizable. The green hull went together well, and I'm pleased with how the cockpit came together; Boba can sit fairly comfortably inside it. Plus, I made a small "Han in Carbonate" bit... I realize it's not quite to scale, but it does fit inside the hull. (However, there's no opening door... I kind of have to dismantle part of the hull to squeeze the carbonate block inside.) Anyway, it's fairly swooshable (I mean, it's big, and doesn't have the best grip, but it doesn't fall apart when swooshed, so that counts, right?) Plus, the wings and weapons rotate, so it can go from horizontal parked mode to vertical flying mode with ease.

I'm kind of hoping this does well in the contest, if nothing more than "Wow, look, a whole ship!" On the other hand, I have not figured out the logistics of shipping this over to Virginia. It's big and bulky and heavy, so it's going to take space and cost a lot. Plus, some of the connections are finicky at best. (This is also one of the few MOCs I've made where I've been completely frustrated with a connection point. It should've worked... I needed to line up like 8 pins into a long liftarm. But getting them to actually fit into place... more of a nightmare than I anticipated. I ended up changing the whole connection of the red section to the green section because I couldn't get the original idea to work.) Getting this to BrickFair in one piece (or easy to reassemble portions) will be difficult...

But anyway, that's the most custom building I've done since BricksCascade. So yay, entering another BBC Contest.