And right back into revamp town. Though his weapon isn’t as crazy as it used to be, F.O.E. (new name pending) is very clearly closer to his original version. There isn’t supposed to be any direct connection to his Task Force variant, just linking it as it’s the only physical version built prior to this point.
But yeah, back to his weapon. The idea is what he has these somewhat-living electrical cords, which respond to his mental commands and can act on their own if they notice something he doesn’t. The original used hinge connectors for this purpose, mostly due to bendy pieces in LDD being a pain. I did experiment going back to this method, after not being thrilled with the ribbed tube method used in Task Force, but it didn’t really work out. Ended up using soft/rubber pneumatic tubing instead and covering it with those more shell tubes to get the black electrical look I wanted. Though since I needed a rubber band to keep the tube bent forwards, that did eliminate his old double-shot design…That, and it just looked so much worse in person, so it was eliminated.
Definitely learned the hard way why not to do the stitched versions vertical for Flickr. Anyways, new name still pending, but we once again have a MOC that is much closer to his original counterpart than a later 2014 version. Though looking at his 2014 version, which was built outside of the revamps for all the others that year…what happened? Why is he so different?
Well, unlike the other archnemeses for the Defenders Team, Waquater Knight was never a villain. He was a vigilante like F.O.E., more of a rival to Rocket Knight, and was in a mutated form. His revamp in 2014 was supposed to be something closer to his original form. But this character has since split into 2-3 different characters that are unrelated to each other. So now the latest MOC version is representing some other character entirely.
As you can guess from the physical pictures, he was one of the villains I purchased through the LDD service. Previously stated, I bought Magma Blaster, Scorpia, and Forest Cutter on the Hero end, but the villain end I got Explosion, two Minion Bots, Flagon, and McStabber. Like with Scorpia and Magma Blaster, I got their respective villains of Explosion and Flagon as they were my favorite of the batch. Plus I had Minion Bots set to come with some of the villains and Explosion had the most. So when factoring cost of the remaining villains to choose from, while I wanted Metal Ock more, he by himself would have been over budget. Not to mention the Minion Bot that also came with him, so McStabber was always second choice.
But like Forest Cutter, having him in person and being the main character in a series of audio logs made me like him a lot more. To the point that he was the only one of the 2011 characters I refused to revamp in 2014. I had considered just leaving him alone this time as well, but he needed to come more in line with the rest of the cast, so upgrades it is.
Ah yes, my favorite coward who has a tiny, far more dangerous mook. And the last of the 2011 revamps, huzzah! If you’re wondering what’s coming out of his mouth, that is the Minifig welding gun piece. Turns out that can fit inside the eye socket on the other side, so I’m using that as his headset mic. Or if you’re my sister, it doubles as a cigarette.
But yeah, three years ahead of HF’s mecha game. Kinda. Alright not really, but the closest to it. I added the Minifig because I wanted to give him a deployable drone and it seemed like a very funny idea to have a Minifig fighting the giant constraction figures. So for me personally it’s very funny that HF would run with that concept in its final year, using some CCBS builds as mechs and others as kaiju. Figured I’d lean into that more this time around with the duo.
Ah, another previously story-only character given physical form. And one of my favorite characters to boot, though if you’ve seen my RPCs that probably wasn’t hard to figure out. I either have serious edgelords or wacky-goofy fellows with serious tales.
So why rebuilt theses guys little over two years later? Well, I wanted all my HF characters in a physical form, so that included them. Aside from the obvious color changes due to physical parts limitations, they do share a number of improvements over their digital counterparts. They’re a lot more structurally sound on the internals…which I forgot to take pictures of for comparison. Despite how it may look, Speedy’s gun arms are completely different on the inside.
It may have just been a two year gap, but building these guys physically I had no idea what I was thinking. Both as in, “how did I come to this solution?” and “why did I build it that way, you know it wouldn’t hold well.”
And we’re back on the new train with another story-only character, Scrap Crusher! With some goofy arms, so what’s going on here? Well, I wanted a punching feature, like Rock’em Sock’em, but didn’t want to go the typical Technic beam scissor style. And I wanted to go with something simplistic, as the character was described as having specialized hydraulics and pistons, so I went with this simple push axel through peg hole construction.
. . .
It sucks. I don’t mean how lame it looks when the arms extend, that’s unintentionally hilarious. Going from these beefy Popeye forearms to the thinnest sticks imaginable. What a joke! But no, the function itself. If I gave myself more time, perhaps I could solve it, but pushing the arms forward into a punching motion isn’t fun and difficult. The shoulders like to move when attempting to push on the gears, my gear choices were too small but anything bigger would be weird, and the forearms otherwise just flop around.
His legs are also supposed to have this function, but after the arms I decided it was better to give the vague notion of it rather than an attempted function. Perhaps I’ll return to this function idea again in future, but this attempt is a failure.
Ah Decapitator my old friend, ye whom I had to censor on the old Lego General Gallery to get it past moderation. Simplified, cleaned up, and hopefully my visually coherent. Let me know if you can tell he has three eyes and isn’t just a cyclops. Because of how messy the original is, I could understand how most were unable to tell that he has three eyes and not just the one atop his head, but for those I showed later seem to still be surprised that the things on the side of the head are eyes as well. Something still yet to improve on.
Name still pending, but as inventor of the Meteor Blaster he of course has a specialized variant. And some other, bigger claims to fame that you may one day see.
