Aerotech: A LEGO® creation by William Vandyk : MOCpages.com

Aerotech

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I feel the need, the need for speed...

About this creation

A spur of the moment project. I've been working on a very large ship and had just finished the escape pods for it which, on the fourth complete redesign (the earlier ones were little egg shaped things, very cool, very hard to integrate), came out very well - this is it here. As you can see it has space for one person to leap in, seal the hatch and get away from the danger area as fast as possible, but nothing more.

However, the design was so satisfying to me that I wondered if I could turn it into more of a small fighter or scout craft and after a little experimenting I came up with a bit of a gem, which uses the same chassis but with enhanced wing structures and two little guns slung underneath.

Many years ago I used to play a game called Battletech which had an aerospace counterpart called Aerotech. One of the many fighters you could fly was called the Seydlitz and this new fighter seemed to bear more than a passing resemblance to it from memory. So, by the power of Google, I looked up some of the other great designs and paid homage/ripped them off.

Seydlitz is an interceptor, small, fast, nimble and with sufficient poke from its two gatling guns to cause a serious threat to larger fighter craft when deployed in sufficient numbers.

Corsair is a mid sized fighter, with four fixed guns and eight ship to ship missiles slung under its wings, tasked with suppressing enemy fighters and interceptors.

Shilone is a fighter bomber, with six wing mounted cannon and two rail guns mounted on the top, she's designed for fighting corvettes and frigates.

Reaver is a superiority fighter, capable of fighting everything from interceptors to small capital ships and as such is the king of the combat theatre. With a dedicated weapons officer controlling the payload of twenty missiles plus four heavy repeater cannon at the command of the pilot underestimating a Reaver is the last mistake many a pilot has made.

Vanquish is a bomber, with an array of forward mounted heavy cannon, used for divebombing, and three bomb bays which can hold a selection of tactical devices, in this case eight vertical release bombs and four rather evil looking missiles. Vanquish hunts larger capital ships and fixed installations but its size and lack of agility make it an easy target for smaller fighters.

Added to these I created a marine boarding craft (not based on a previous design) which has space for a team of eight troopers plus an officer, usually safely installed in his command seat midship (an idea borrowed from Aliens, I admit). The engine pods on the end of the wings can rotate for fine control if the ships is to land on the surface of a target and the squad fight their way in.