Tech – Page 58 – Robot Claw

Tydirium

June 1, 2011

I suppose one of the hallmarks of being a Star Wars fan is to have a favourite spaceship. For me, that has always been the shuttle Tydirium.

This was the imperial shuttle stolen by the good guys on used to sneak onto Endor to disable the shield in Return Of The Jedi. Another of the same ships was inserted into the special edition of The Empire Strikes Back as The Emperors personal shuttle.

I’ve always loved the design of the ship, and was therefore astounded when Lego released this product last Christmas:

Happily, I received the above for my birthday this year, and yesterday finally completed assembly.

Here’s a shot of the contents of the box:

Observe the four instruction books, which are loosely separated into one for the body and cockpit, and one each for the two wings and sail. The pieces on the other hand are not sorted in any way (as they are in some Lego kits), which means almost all of those bags were opened within only a few pages of the first manual.

That’s 2503 pieces to sort through from virtually the very start! Believe me when I say that makes for a very slow assembly.

Construction starts with the body of the shuttle, which contains an elaborate mechanism to move the wings:

This was challenging. Not hard, just fiddly. Some of the gearing is most definitely at the Lego Technic level, and I’d say this portion alone is enough to make the kit overall not for beginners. Aligning the gears to be level and move in unison took a bit of fiddling, and the completion of the body + cockpit took quite a few hours in total over a few days.

I did have a friend helping…

Next was the sail on top of the shuttle:

That shot should give you an idea of the sheer size of this model… but more on that later. When I was attaching the sail I dropped the kit and a large section broke off. Luckily the interior gearing was not damaged, else I may have had to start again from scratch. As it was I only had about 30 minutes of repairs 🙂

It would be difficult to attach the wings without the body off the ground, so the landing gear came next:

You can see (click on the image to enlarge) the mechanism for attaching the legs. Seems easy in principle doesn’t it? Well in my case it absolutely was not, and one of the pegs just wouldn’t go it without a lot of tinkering. There are two ways to display the finished kit – either on the legs shown above or on a stand with the wings swept down. I will likely go for the latter, but I’m not looking forward to removing the legs!

I was up to books 3 and 4 now; the wings. I’d say total build time up to this point was 7-10 hours (working at a slow pace to enjoy the process).

The wings may look fragile but they are rock hard, reinforced as they are throughout with crossbeams and ‘rivets’. This would be an extremely time-consuming kit to disassemble.

Attachment of the wings to the wing struts was the final frustration point, mostly because of the weight of the wing and the fiddly-ness of the attachment point (remember what I said about gears aligning?). Once the rods were inserted though, the wings are on there forever!

A 75% completed shot. By now (> 10 hours build time, over a few weeks) you can see that Sausage had found herself a sleep spot. 95% of the time I was building she was right where you see her in that photo. In the background (just above right from Yoss) you can see the next Lego kits on my ‘to build’ list, and above Yoss (on the chest) you can see a pile of jigsaws (one of which I will build this weekend) and Gundam kits.

So the shuttle is now complete, and here’s what it looks like to scale:

No, that is not an illusion. Yes, it really is that big. And heavy. This is hands down the biggest Lego model I own (even including the Death Star) and probably the heaviest as well. But I love it! It was enormously entertaining to build and looks absolutely amazing. Even though I don’t know right now where I’ll put it, you can bet I already treasure it 🙂

Game Dev Story

April 30, 2011

Game Dev Story is a charming iOS game that has had me hooked for the better part of the last week.

In the game you run a game company, and your goal is to succeed in the competitive world of the game industry. You choose which games to make (style and genre) and which system to make them for and then release them and hope they succeed! With success comes money and the opportunity to hire more and better staff. Eventually you’ll be upgrading your offices, making sequels to hit games, winning industry awards and even releasing your own console.

The above shows the first console I developed, the strikingly named Satan Engine. This was 17 years into the game, and in real-world-equivalent times this 64-bit Blu-ray drive monster was going up against 16 bit offerings from ‘Senya’ and ‘Intendro’. Obviously I wiped the carpet with them, quickly gaining 26% of the market. (The slightly blurred graphics are because I am playing an iPhone game at double-size on the iPad)

This was helped of course by my launch game:

Since Acrosatan X I have released a few other games, including a ‘music’ style game in the genre ‘cuties’ (called Pantsu Dreaming) that scored 40/40!

Even so, it was the long awaited sequel to Beating Jesus (BS: I expect a comment on this) that would be my first Game Of The Year. I guess those F1 Driving fans are more numerous than I thought?

The game is very cute and light-hearted, and one nice element is that there are certain… unusual staff members that can periodically be available for hire. The best is this guy:

Yep, Grizzly Bearington the legendary bear-producer. At his job interview, he said he had left the woods in search of honey! He’s perhaps not the most skilled employee I have, but he certainly brightens the office with his presence:

I’ve sunk many hours into Game Dev Story, and considering it was only $1.99 (on sale from $3.99) it’s well, well worth the price. There are few enough Japanese developed games on the US App Store, but considering the quality of this one (and the Cave shooters) I can only hope we’ll see more in the future.

Mega Mantis

April 21, 2011

My brother got me this kit for my birthday:

I just assembled it. The parts are all aluminium, and the nuts and bolts that hold everything together are tiny!

The instructions are clear and very nicely done, with a 1:1 scale list of parts on the other side. It is very easy to know how to put the kit together:

Actually putting it together was quite challenging though. It took me about an hour in total, and most of the time was consumed by trying to get nuts on the end of very tiny bolts with very little room in which to maneuver. Of course I was stubborn, and never went and got tweezers. This particularly step was by far the worst:

The springs are there to make the wings have a bit of ‘give’. Unfortunately although the kit has a lot of springs, none of the others do anything and are purely for visual impact, such as this one:

I did like how some of the parts were made of ‘soft aluminium’ (as described by the manual) and can be bent as the owner sees fit. The antennae are an example:

Here’s a shot to show the scale of the finished mantis:

And here is a dramatic shot showing this mantid golem in it’s natural habitat: