Gentlemen! I have built, THIS THING! Guardian Mech

I know it's two days late but, I had reasons. I was just going to show you a heavily modified Magma Mech from the Power Miners line (readers from Sydlexia may remember me posting crappy pictures of it there way back when.) After digging it out and looking it over however, I felt the urge to tweak it a little. Said tweaks turned into hours of rebuilding basically from the ground up and I had to give it a rest when it was one thirty Wednesday morning and I had to work at ten. So after work, I snagged a Ninjago Fangpyre Mech mainly for arm joints and went back to work. After building the Fangpyre Mech and studying some of the new joints they had incorporated, I had to scrap half of what I built to add a waist joint and other bits. However, the final result scares even me...

Here it is, the Guardian Mine Defense Mech! I was thinking that this is what the miners use as security patrols, seeing as their primary antagonists seem to be giant lava monsters. Inspiration for the design clearly goes to Battletech mechs and ED-209 from Robocop.

The right arm has a twin-barreled grenade launcher with an under-slung rocket tube assembly

The left arm combines two long-range, armor-piercing cannons with a flamethrower nestled between them, note the drum fuel tanks.



Articulation is pretty good since I cannibalized every decent joint I had. The waist turns freely, the arms have ball joints at the shoulder and "wrist" and the legs have ratcheting hips and ball joint knees and ankles.



A view of the back section. The cylindrical section the hoses are connected to is part of the power core. The box below the "15" is actually a supply crate for field kit. There is also a shovel pegged to one side of it and a pick on the other. I liked the idea of the pilot having all the gear he might need strapped to the mech, like modern tanks have trench shovels and whatnot.



And what life saving gear is he carrying you ask? Why, a frying pan and a sausage of course!



Shot of the cockpit open and the brave pilot. The clear bits behind his head are supposed to be cabin lights and an alarm light, respectively.



Cockpit shot with pilot and canopy removed so you can see what he's got to work with. There are two control sticks and a holographic display, as well as binoculars and a rifle clipped next to his seat so he's prepared for anything. Anything that doesn't require a sausage at least...

Finally, our hero makes camp in the shadow of his machine. Still, even cooking dinner requires vigilance...

There you go folks, sorry I was late on posting this week, but I hope you feel it was worth the wait. I sure do!

Gentlemen! I have built, THIS THING! The Dogfish

It's Tuesday, let's make this a semi-regular thing! Without further ado, I give you the Dogfish Submarine.

This one has actually been built for quite some time and gathering dust, but better camera means showing off things I couldn't really before! This is meant to be a mid-size patrol and pursuit sub to help defend dig sites. That's what Atlantis divers are doing down there, right? Anyways.

Cockpit detail! One of the first things I tried to do when I started building this was to use the two ovoid green window pieces I had as "eyes" on a larger craft. As I built, the sub started becoming long and streamlined and the overall shape reminded me of the dogfish family of sharks which is how it got the name. Seems to be a trend in my naming of sea going vessels I build. Oh well, I promise I'll be more imaginative in naming when I'm not building fish subs.



And opened up. The two "eyes" swing outwards and the ridge of the "skull" lifts up, though it's sort of cut off in this picture. The pectoral fins are on ball joints so they can lie flat for docking. This diver is from the Wreck Raider set and is clearly the coolest because he has both an eye patch and a beard.



Here's a longer shot showing the cockpit open and the top ridge I mentioned. The fan turbines towards the rear rotate and the tail flukes can pivot up and down a bit as well as the aforementioned ball jointed pectoral fins. Looking at this one compared to the Stone Fish, I feel like there's no way the Dogfish could catch it. I suppose that's the point of the two ships designs though; the Dogfish is designed to chase for short distances and ward off with its weaponry while the Stone Fish is built for speed, speed and speed and would only need light weaponry to attack cargo subs or what have you.

Really, all that boils down to is that I spent more time and effort on the Stone Fish's engines...



Some engine and undercarriage detail. In theory, other divers could cling to those outer cages on the sides and get ferried from place to place as well as stow supplies in there. In fact, nothing really fits in there but guys can cling to the cages.

And to be thorough, an underside shot. Obviously, this submarine was built primarily with Atlantis sets. Specifically, Wreck Raider, Guardian of the Deep, Typhoon Turbo Sub and Seabed Scavenger. As usual, there may also be a few Space Police or Power Miners parts in there, but who can say really.

Well, that's it for the second installment of Gentlemen! I have built, THIS THING! I have one more thing already constructed I can show you next week, but after that I'll need to get busy on building something new. Tune in and see what the future holds!

Gentlemen! I have built, THIS THING!

After having a conversation a few days ago with an old high school friend about Legos, I had the urge to build something, so I went to dig out my bin o' parts. And couldn't find it. Damn. Moving on, I scrapped a couple of sets I had built and liked enough not to completely destroy after a week but which were getting beat up in the box they were stashed in, resulting in this!

I call it the Stone Fish, because it looks quite a bit like one. Unintentionally, I was just building with the pieces I had and ended up with a short, squat, heavy looking submarine. I was actually trying to build some sort of star ship when I started but once I added the propeller engines, it looked a lot more aquatic.

That's the alien pilot from the Space Police set I used some pieces of this from in there behind the semi-truck like windshield. He has a control yoke you can sort of see and a gun clipped into a rack next to his seat, but as I didn't design a way to easily open and close the cockpit, he's in there for the long haul.

Side view. I imagine the long, swept back fin on the top is a communications antenna.

View of all the engines and turbines, thing must be pretty fast. Although, it's also heavy both in real life piece weight and in universe (whatever universe that might be) due to it's undoubtedly thick armor.

Here's your overhead. I didn't really put any weapons on it mainly because I couldn't figure out any halfway decent looking ones with the parts at hand.

Undercarriage, nothing fancy. To fill space, I built this ship using parts from a couple Powers Miners sets, a couple Atlantis sets, a Space Police set that was a literal space pick up truck and a Star Wars Tri-Droid set.

And another shot of the engines and a bit of the hull. Note the little claws it rests on, those are used to grip surfaces so the sub can cling to unlikely spots and lay ambush to unsuspecting Atlantis guys. Whatever those divers are supposed to be doing in the Atlantis sets...

So there you go, give me a bucket of Legos and a couple days to fiddle with a design and this is the sort of thing I make. If and when I find the rest of my Legos, I'm probably going to pop the head off the alien pilot guy and replace it with the shark head piece of one of the shark man figures that are intended to menace the Atlantis divers but are too low tech to have built and subsequently piloted this thing. And so I can live out my Lego/Street Sharks crossover fantasies.