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Taggerung1 — Eta-2 Actis Interceptor v2
Published: 2014-08-05 23:01:11 +0000 UTC; Views: 962; Favourites: 17; Downloads: 0
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I gave it a little more time, and tried again. This time, I'm actually pretty pleased with the result. It's still a little larger than I'd like, but those wing and cockpit pieces only go so small. Aesthetically, I think I got more details in this time, and made fewer compromises. There's a couple things I could do better with the right parts, but I don't always have 'em. The main thing I changed, aside from the wing construction, is that I moved the hinges holding the wing, in closer to the center by one stud, narrowing the whole thing.Related content
Comments: 11
Not exactly impressed. You used the pieces of the newer set but discarded almost everything of value from the design (to the point that you may as well have just modified the 2005 set), including the astromech socket, the rear wings angling back toward the cockpit, and the wider wings making the cockpit more proportional. Trying to make something like this "scale" with a minifig is a fool's errand - minifigs tend to take scale into a dark alley and beat it up with spiked clubs.
You also built the guard walls around the cockpit backwards, and the straight edge of the small angle plate poking forward makes the front of the wings look off, negating the benefit of the inward slope.
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Alright, well... The Astromech socket was stupid and ugly in the set, and I knew from the second I bought it that it would be the first thing to go. The 'walls' around the cockpit are placed in the spot where they fit best. There might be a better way to do it, but not with the parts I have on hand. I don't think the straight edge on the angled plates at the front 'negate' anything. It's a little annoying and doesn't look perfect, but until there's a better way, I'm satisfied with this. And I narrowed the wings very much on purpose, because the original set was preposterously oversized for a minifigure to sit in.
I'm pleased with my changes, and I'd do it again. (In fact, I did. Obi-wan's Jedi Interceptor coming soon!)
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I guess I didn't articulate clearly enough: I think that your sacrificing the ship's proportionality with itself in an effort to make it more in "scale" with minifigures was a fundamentally flawed approach that just makes the ship ugly and less functional, especially since by your own admission the gains were minor.
Dealing with things being oversize or undersize to minifigures is part of the price of playing with Lego, because of a combination of two things: A. Legos are building toys that have to be somewhat thick for stability and strength, and B. Minifigures are weird things that due to their design and construction reeaaally mess up scale and proportion. A seated minifigure has the effective leg length of someone whose legs were chopped off at the knees, yet at the same time they take up so much space that a car that's the same size relative to one as a 4 or 5-seater sedan is to a real person is lucky to be able to sit more than one minifig - to be able to seat 5 minifigs it has to be giant relative to them.
And on the subject of scale, if you really want that to be the overriding design factor in your Eta-2 model then you should go even smaller than the original 2005 set was (so, about the length of a modern City car) and use car windshield pieces of some kind instead of the official cockpit piece. Of course, this would result in a really cramped model that was dwarfed by everything else and you wouldn't even be able to use the head of an astromech minifigure (because those are out of scale with Lego human minfigures) but there you go.
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You know, you're right. Minifigures make scale difficult. You know what else? I don't care. I'm happy with it like this.
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Okay.
Still makes me wonder why you bought the newer set when you could have done this with the 2005 one though. Was it the minifigs?
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Partially the minifigs, but also the old set was flimsy and didn't have a lot of parts, and this one had more of the angles and such. The parts to build something like this, which the old set just didn't have.
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I see.
Yeah, the old set is flimsy and no mistake.. I actually rebuilt both of mine (and recolored one of them) to be more like the modern Jedi Interceptor sets (I've come to prefer their more precise capturing of the shape, and the working astromech socket is something I always wanted) after getting Obi-Wan's and seeing how much more solid that one was.
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Yeah. You mentioned that the side of the front tips of the wings on mine has that flat bit that messes up the shape. And you're right, but so does the set's way of doing it, it's just on the front. I figured that's supposed to be a sharp angle there, so my way looks closer. I don't think there is a way to do it right.
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Perhaps not. I just prefer the set's way myself because it doesn't give the appearance of protruding.
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Regarding this build, maybe it would work to use shorter tiles at the front so you could move those wedges 1 stud inward?
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