65 Piranha

Build 8-10/11 2005, Pieces 196, Steås 53
L/W/H: 29/12/10 studs, 12,33/9,21/7,66 cm

Sorry about the washed out colours, still the same old analogue camera and the sun doesn't rise above the roofs across from the bathroom window in the winter

Colours: With the previous mocs I hadn't had much success in achieving decent colourschemes: Mainly because of the large uniform shapes made primarily of intertwined parts made colour variation and sectioning difficult:
The large wing/carapace section of the #64 Bubblecraft 2 for instance was made of a large number of plates often stretching from edge to edge that only enabled a very basic stripy pattern that would break up the shape - while lines and groups of colour were out of the question because it would simply fall apart. The surfaces of the 61 Shark 2 were too small and integrated to hold any colour variation.

Originally the craft started out as part of the Shark series, but its distinct forward underhung jaw just looked like a piranha. It took me a while to find a gun design that would fit into the mouth so it was less prominently unaerodynamic.

Freze style: On the other hand, even though the colours weren't perfect in my model 60 Horn, the use of big slopes showed great potential as they could be used for individual groups of colours.
At the same time, I had been very interested in the works of another spacer on CSF for a long time: Kyle Vrieze aka "Freze". His style relies heavily on these new types of large slopes and wedges, and the way he uses them in armour plate/robotic looking sections that seemed to make it pretty easy to work with colour grouping.

When Freeze posted his Spartan fighter 30th October I was instantly inspired to do something about it and said so. The Piranha was the result.

Clever use of unorthodox colour for hard top canopy, eh? Actually, it was very close to ending up in a greyscale from white to dark grey, but I'd run out of transparent canopies, so I guess it was a lucky fluke ;-)

Elements: Technically it ended up pretty far from the Spartan, because I mainly used techniques from earlier models: 
- The cockpit from the 61 Shark2 (although angled on top like the Shark instead of at the bottom)
- The swooped up thorny tail and the fanned out bottom from the 60 Horn
- The "chin" gun, tail (and side engines) from the 46 Shark (still not uploaded)

So shapewise it ended up like my other stuff, but the groupings of colours on a darker background, and the use of wedges for engine pods definitely point back to the Spartan.

Another angle of the cockpit. A tile on a clip forms the controls.
Yeah, I'm always low on dark grey 1x3 plates, so the ones inside the engine got to match the cockpit.

The model was presented on CSF, and got a really nice review on the lego blog Goldspleem (thanks Jonesy ;-) )

VTOL engines so it can get off the ground.
The gun can move a bit up and down

The rear: I wanted the engines to have a good solid mounting with those 3x3 technic wheels, but since I only got those in light grey, I made the big engine radiator and the grille on top of the craft light grey as well.

I'm pretty satisfied with the smooth look of the engine section, even though the craft ended up a bit messy greywise.
Note the rare depiction of the fanned out bottom below the engine

The usual Jumper technique: the two sides are kept together by the technic pins at the bottom, and especially by the 5 round black plates kept together by the red technic axle in the middle of the picture. (Click the picture to enlarge)