This project was born out my desire to use the large trans-smoke cockpit from the Jango Fett Slave I in a different way. I started with the middle part of the ship and worked my way out. The cockpit seemed tall enough to accomodate two minifig command stations and then I developed the idea of the cockpit being the lowest hanging part of the ship. Officers assigned to these vehicles jokingly refer to themselves as flying "The Birth Patrol", since the whole ship does resemble a very familiar reproductive system.
The cockpit was a lot of fun to design. I wanted to have a regular street officer and a lieutenant. Later I hit on the idea of having a video camera mounted on the vehicle just as most police cars do now. Not only can the officers record their arrests, but now TV stations can bring you up-to-the-minute pursuit action by getting the live feed from the camera and broadcasting it as events unfold! "Watcha gonna go when dey come fo' you?!"
Lots of spaceheads enjoy using gears for their engine designs, and I think that's a cool look so I wanted to try it here. You can see the large landing gear foot that took quite a bit of work. As the ship is top-heavy and falls backward immediately, I had to come up with something stout that would also not bulk up the lower part of the ship when it was retracted.
The ship's tendency to fall backward is easy to see in this picture. The foot isn't terribly stable and does require some manual adjustment when it's deployed to make sure that the foot and the bottom of the cockpit are laying completely flat.
Here is what took so much time. I wanted the foot to retract as flush as possible and minimize the bulk that it would add to the cockpit bulb. I just wish I could've fit another one of those shocks in there, but they can't be mounted side by side because they're just slightly wider than a regular beam.
This overhead shows the three large Ship ID numbers as well as the small ones on the front of the cockpit. I envisioned the large red & blue ones as being usefull for ship-to-ship visual confirmation since they can only be seen from above and behind whereas the small yellow ones would be how the officers identify their vehicle from the others parked in line since they're on the ground looking up.
I wanted some really heavy-duty, badass looking engines to power this baby, and the new propellor housings from the Life On Mars sets worked perfectly inside to give the impression of a large intake manifold. Since the engines rotate (scroll further down) I wasn't able to power the propellors to spin because the rotation mechanism took up all the interior space.
From the moment I started on the engine design I wanted to have VTOL capability. It took quite a bit of time and I've finally managed to make it work pretty reliably. In between both quads of engines is a crane weight to make them rotate faster and make the transition quicker.
In these two pictures I've removed the cables for a clearer view of the VTOL mechanism. The white beams and its connecting axle remain compressed when the engines are horizontal. Angle the ship forward, press inward on the black beams and the engines will rotate upward for landing. When the engines becomes vertical, the rear slots rotate forward and the axles connected to the white beams pops into these slots and hold the engines in place.
Angle the ship backward and press inward again on the white beams to bring the engines back to cruising position.
Below, the engine and locking mechanisms have been separated for a (hopefully!) clearer view.
Here you can see the part of the rotation mechanism inside the engines. By themselves, the technic beams had substantial wobble and the engines were kinda floppy. I then added the "L" half-beams to help stabilize them.
Lastly we come to the lights! Gotta have lots o' lights to let the bad guys know that you're on their case! I was just able to fit a 9V battery box inside the middle of the ship and then add as many lights as I could.
I was especially pleased with how the spotlight also illuminates the Classic Space logo. The beam from the spotlight is actually quite powerful and can quickly throw a sharp little circle of "gotcha!" on any suspicious character!
"Attention, citizen! Disengange your hyperdrive immediately and pull over to the nearest M-class planet!"
They're a little fuzzy, but I think these last two pics do a decent job of showing the spotlight in action.
