Flight Around Theed - LEGO MOC

 

Motion in miniature.

 

The building challenge for this month's LUG meeting had the prompts "motion/kinetic" and "TV show." After a bit of thought, I remembered two things: first, that I had a build I'd started but abandoned a few years ago; and second, that Star Wars: The Clone Wars was a TV show long before it was on Disney+.

So I dug out the ziploc bag that contained the build, and assessed the damage.

Whenever I partially disassemble a build, I make an effort to have the chunks be meaningful and easy to figure out how they go back together. With this one, however, it had been in the bag for so long and jostled about so much that things were a little more messy than usual. After a bit of remembering and experimental piecing, I was able to return it to the way it had been:

I'd stopped the build at the time because I wasn't entirely satisfied with the way it looked, and I had been considering incorporating some form of gearing to make the tilting of the track more mechanical (and perhaps ultimately able to be tied to a power source). I still wasn't quite thrilled with the way the buildings fit together, feeling more haphazard than organic (which makes sense, since I was piecing it together exploratorily, and limited to the parts I had at the time). I also wasn't sure if the layers (track on the bottom, then underwater, then Theed on top) made sense—it would have worked better if instead of a speeder they were driving a bongo or other underwater craft, so I decided to take things apart.

Leaving the city portion intact for the sake of comparison, I gathered up the parts I thought I might need.

I also reviewed the inspirations that had got me thinking about the build in the first place, as well as new ones that have improved my building skills in the interim. In the former category are James Gurney's Dinotopia and Jonathan Bresman's The Art of Episode I; in the latter are Alice Finch's The Lego Architecture Idea Book and "Build your Own Hogwarts Castle" set number 30435.

Thoroughly inspired, I was able to start fresh.

I worked on all of the elements of the build, starting with the speeder. The baggie of pieces in various shades of purple in the picture up top gives an idea of the lengths to which I went in trying to build a speeder that would be light enough to glide easily around the track, but also look appropriately Star Wars-y and streamlined. As such, I didn't need to do much more than swap out a few pieces (light grey for dark grey, for example, or adding the cheese wedge windscreen) to finalize it. Because the battle droid doesn't have antistuds on the back of his legs, like a minifigure, I used a SNOT bracket for his feet to mount onto.

I decided to move the underwater portion of the build to the bottom of the build ("De planet core!"), which meant it would need to be much sturdier. So I rebuilt it on the same lines, adding more variety of aquatic life and little details. I'll discuss the top of this portion in a moment.

The track and pivot setup—both the design and the parts themselves—are from the "Super Mario Big Urchin Beach Ride Expansion Set," set number 71400. I'd tried a few different modifications, but ultimately decided that the setup in the set was the best approach, so I re-assembled it by following the instructions:

When it came to the top portion—and the most complex—I started with a fresh baseplate, in dark bluish grey, to represent the bedrock underlying the city, then added a layer of dark tan plates for the buildings' foundations and pavement. The gap running down the middle is a waterway:

After a little trial and error, the build began to come together, inspired by the first attempt as well as by the research I had done and the growth I've had as a builder. I added more signs of life to the water, including a satin trans-clear 1x1x2/3 dome (an extra from the CMF 28 Frog Costume minifigure) to represent the canopy of a bongo docked beside a 1x2x2/3 grille slope staircase. Remembering just how verdant the Naboo city of Theed was—in the movies, the cartoon, and the LEGO video games—I made sure to add lots of leafs and 1x1 flowers to represent windowboxes and climbing vines.

I made use of 1x2 jumper arches and 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 corner arches to make a miniature colonnade around a 3L Technic pin column (inserted into the antistud of two 1x1 round bricks, the top stud of which is inserted into a 2x2 round tile with a hole). A 1x6 arch became a covered walkway, and Technic and SNOT bricks became walls with windows. Throughout I used the colors and shapes to tie the elements together and make them feel unified without becoming uniform.

As hinted above, I paid special attention to the join points between the different sections. Because I would be driving this to the LUG meeting, I wanted to make it easier to carry: the easiest method being to take the Modular approach and design the sections to hold together securely but also be easy to separate. Between the underwater and track portion, I used cheese slopes to align the 1x4 plates into position.

And between the track and city portions, I used 1x1 plates at the corners for join points, leaving gaps so my fingers could fit in to split them apart.

I'm quite pleased with the final result, evoking the feel of Theed, right down to the waterfall plunging into Naboo's flooded planet core. The microscale buildings and cloud pieces give a forced perspective in contrast to the minifigure-scale speeder bearing the Gungan and battle droid around and around.