NX-92 Scythe
“If it has to be there yesterday, it has to go by Scythe.”
The Scythe is meant for carrying small, important cargo from point A to point B without getting stopped in between. It has no armament to speak of, but it is equipped with the standard Blacktron cloaking system, as well as a very special engine. The Scythe is one of the only Blacktron ships with faster-than-light capabilities, making its slogan more than just exageration. Naturally, this property makes it extremely popular among smugglers.
The ship’s odd design is compensated by the internal anti-grav generator, which ordinarliy is used only for takeoff, landing, and minor maneuvering. In the Scythe, it performs a double roll by shifting the vessel’s center of mass over to where it needs to be for stable flight. Failure of the anti-grav generator would theoretically send an unfortunate pilot to a spiraling doom, but this has never happened yet. It is also this odd design that often inspires such interesting names as “One Armed Bandit,” “Fish Bone,” and “SST.”
Design Notes:
An Experiement in asymmetry, the Scythe embraces the ideas found in Renegade and takes them a step further. After I decided to build a ship with the form of a scythe, the first step was modifying the Lego group’s Invader. The three modules still follow the basic Nose-Cargo-Engine pattern of the Invader, and if you look at the port side of the cargo module, you can also see another minor resemblance to Invader. This is also my first model that required some preliminary sketches. If I get around to finding a scanner, I’ll put up the drawing.
To make it truly Blacktron, I tried to make it very functional. This meant that it had to be modular, and no space should be wasted. In the end, I’m rather satisfied with the results. Ordinarily, I probably would not have bothered building the droid compartment or the droid, but I felt that there was just a bunch of solid Lego in the middle of the drive section that wasn’t being used for anything at all. So, I used it. :)
Propulsion
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Armament
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