10 Diamond

Build 27/7 1997, Pieces: 89, Weight: 147,5g, Steps 17
L/W/H: 29/24/7 studs, 23,2/19,5/5,24 cm

The light nose and cockpit seems outbalanced by the massive enginestructure from certain angles. A nice feature is that the cannons follow the curve of the wings.

Description: Basically this heavyfighter comprised three parts: The diamondshaped nose, a minimal cockpit, and a engineblock where the wings was fixed.

The solid rear part of the ship holds the engine, fuel and other important functions.

Engines: Although I tried to lighten up the structure compared to earlier models, I apparently couldn't really escape the idea that this type of engines needed a solid enginestructure and a lot of fuel, and used a lot of bricks on that section.

Big but not dominating, you can still see the design of the engineblock.

The landing gear was also an experiment: It needed to be flat and give the impression of VTOL (Vertical TakeOff and Landing) capability, without disturbing the design of the engine by looking too massive. With the perforated spacedishes, you were still able to see the design through them.

Secret behind low use of bricks: minimal cockpit and thin wings.

Minimalism: The secret behind the low number of bricks: Although the engine is massive, its made primarily of bricks, and the rest of the fighter is a unusually minimalistic cockpit (without sides, only the windshield) and thin wings.

This is how it's supposed to be seen! - a pancake only looks flat form the side;-)

Flatness: The model is fairly simple, but what fascinates me about it is its extreme flatness, it just spreads out to extreme broadness, and would be wery hard to hit when attacking.

The jagged harbinger of the new diamondstyle (although still kind of triangular!)

New trends: There are a lot of elements in this model I would use or continue to work with in following models: 

The employment of wings individually in jagged points in different directions (especially forwardreaching) was something I would do increasingly in later models eventually resulting in the later "Clawstyle". But for the time being, the cool design with the flat diamondshaped nose was the start of the "Diamondstyle."