"Ten": The Missile and the Corpse

This week was to deal with "The Prototype", but that project is proving more difficult than I had thought, so we have a pair of simpler builds to showcase today.

The first is pretty simple: The Missile. This is the deadly projectile that our hero is sent to stop. Notice there is no detailed bottom to it, and that's because the bottom of the missile will never be in the shot. We'll see the top of it as the hero approaches the silo on the moon's surface and we'll see the shaft as he is in the silo, but never the bottom.

One further note about this build: Over 50% of it is made from parts I recently purchased through Brinklink store proceeds. That little shop is quite productive!


This second build requires some back story. I've been collecting LEGO since I was a kid and I still have parts from Classic Space sets stretching back to the mid 1980's. Now, LEGO is not indestructible. It develops wear and tear in the form of scratches, dirt and, yes, bite marks. The pieces that show the worst wear and tear are naturally the white ones.

While working on the prototype (which is going to be dominantly white in color) I started picking our the grungier white pieces and came upon an idea. The moon's defences has shot down a number of invading forces, and I was planning on this info being revealed in the dialogue between the Governor and our hero, but what if we actually showed one of those shot down ships?

I then gathered the rest of the dirty pieces and places them in a basket and worked on a ship just from that, with the intention of making the design look very much like Classic Space but with bits of it blown off and decaying. The above is the result. If nothing else it proved a morale booster: While the Prototype continues to confound me, I was able to build the above in about fifteen minutes with my daughter sitting on my knee.

The spaceman corpse was another fun idea. I have a number of torsos where the old planet symbol is fading or nearly faded off. I plopped a skull head on him and outfitted him with the space suit and presto: A callback to a distant LEGO age (Not only does this closeup give you a good look at the spaceman, but it also gives you a better idea of how grungy those bricks really are).

The more I thought about this the better I liked it. The Governor can have an additional line to the hero about "the surface of that moon is littered with shot down craft. It's like a graveyard". And that will be linked back to whent the hero lands and sees the corpse. Being that the corpse's craft and his own are both white, he can have a "There but for the Grace of God" moment when he passes it by. Maybe he'll even throw it a salute. Great stuff.

Next week (I swear): The Prototype