Companion-piece to my Spyrius Saucer Scout-inspired MOC. This one was way harder... Since Saucer Scout is (almost) rotationally symmetric and has no obvious front/back, I wanted to build something that had no obvious up/down.
It's (almost) perfectly bilaterally symmetric along two axes, and one mirror-line runs through the middle of a stud which created massive construction headaches for me.
I've dealt with half-plate offsets before, but this was the first time I've had to break out graph paper and a calculator to work out how to move things around by a quarter plate thickness to get them to line up.
I wanted it to be highly playable so I put a lot of effort into making it surprisingly sturdy despite its fragile appearance. The wings and neck are locked in tight so you can swoosh it around without breaking anything.
Since there's no definite up/down, you can rotate the center engine on the back to spin the minifig in the cockpit around, so his local "up" can point in any direction.
And just for good measure, it's got two detachable scout drones (also bilaterally symmetrical along two axes because apparently I hate making things easy) that dock on the back of the wings/fins.
Unlike the previous MOC, I tried really hard not to use any illegal techniques on this one. I'm not positive that it's completely legal, but there's nothing egregious. It feels really solid.
Here's what the internal construction looks like in the core - a fair amount of hidden Technic to hold things together (getting this all to line up perfectly was a nightmare):
