It’s funny, when I first started working on this, Starcraft 2 was still a very popular game. I wanted this to work so bad that what you’re looking at are the results of many many trials and errors. I wanted this to work so bad because I thought it would be so cool to have a Zerg ultralisk that can move AND swing its kaiser blades. Given how official Lego Technic sets are mostly vehicles with wheels, this is refreshing.
I recently made a breakthrough, and that is I finally got the legs to move. Before, it would just dance in place. It still suffers from balancing issues, but I believe that can be fixed by making it more complete looking. From here on, I can start making it look more eye appealing, by adding the skin, armor, horns, etc.
First, let’s get straight to it’s main feature. The blades themselves.
Don’t worry about the length of the blades, I know they’re not the right size. I will admit, I am conflicted about what color to make the blades in. Initially, it seemed natural to go with white. Later on, when I was comparing my build to the source material, the blades are never white, which makes sense. It’s not like the Zerg brush or use whitening strips or anything like that. In the game, they’re dark brown. In other Lego MOCs of the ultralisk over the internet, other builders make them in white. Maybe I’ll end up making a few sets of blades to try out since they’re easily replaced.
Besides, the important thing for me was to make it work. Since the blades are the main feature of this build, I worked on it first. Surprisingly, it only took me 2 days of building to get it to work and I’d say it works exactly the way I want it to, especially given the limits of power function motors and the controls on the remote.
The controls are made up of two remotes, oriented in such a way so that you can use your fingers for the triggers on the bottom. The idea was to control it with your thumbs, to move the ultralisk forward, backwards, and turn. The pointer fingers will be used to operate the triggers. A single trigger, when pushed in one direction, will move the a pair of blades to the outer position. Pushing the trigger in the opposite direction will close the same pair of blades. This will be so much cooler to see when I make a video of it. These pictures simply do not do it justice.
It looks a little disproportionate in this picture, but this is still a work in progress. I hope that by making it all brown won’t affect the workings of it too much. I will upload more pictures in the future as it nears completion.