Fixing the Misfortune Keep Flyer! (Part 2)

You might remember my review of the Misfortune Keep. And the modifications I did on the little pirate flyer. Well, I promised you a mod of the Ninjago-flyer as well – and here we go!

Imagine the howling of a powerful, supercharged engine as it rolls down the runway!

While the original version is a weird and not very successful attempt on a rocket-propelled VTOL, my plan was to go in a different direction. The round sloped corner pieces, which made the bulk of the wings, just begged for a dieselpunk-inspired flying wing design.

The idea behind a flying wing is that there is no distinction between fuselage and wings. This made the aircraft ideally being one single wing. With all components integrated into one structure, usually with a quite thick wing profile, a wide wingspan and a short body.

A view at the rear. You can see the two Nexo Knights bases acting as radiators/engine cowls.

To increase the outlandishness of the design I gave it a rear mounted propeller and a large air intake as nose-piece. I also added two silver Nexo Knights base pieces, I had kicking around, as secondary engines. That helps mimicking that typical zigzag pattern a certain flying wing airplane has.

The – so far – final design for the landing gear. Trust me, it didn’t look always so tidy on its underside!

I actually had the plane finished for quite a while. Well, “finished”. But as it often is – I just wasn’t happy with it. The overall design was rather quickly found, but my gosh, getting the landing gear right was a long and painful process. Then, put of the blue, when putting the A-Wing from the Vader’s TIE Advanced vs. A-Wing Starfighter-set together, I realized that the designers of the set have found a surprisingly simple and very practical solution. And it looked totally fine as well!

The A-Wing from set 71550. Its landing gear is so simple, yet so effective!

I had to modify it sligthy and give the landing gear wheels. but in hindsight its a complete miracle to me how I could miss such an obvious fix. This really shows how important it is to look at all sorts of sources for building ideas. Even as obvious ones as actual Lego sets!

I like Lloyds determined expression. It fits pretty well to the rather aggressive than playful look of the plane. Oh and also please note the two machine-guns made of Technic-pieces left and right of the air-intake. Dakkadakkadakka!

All in all I am very happy how the (so far^^) finished plane looks like. Especially the green/grey colour scheme with gold accents works really well and adds a little bit of exotic, steampunkish glamour to its militaristic straightforwardness. Lloyd’s slightly modified look (golden epaulettes instead of his chunky black rocketsuit-thing) works also very well in this context. He looks like a highly decorated flying ace of some exotic far-eastern army rather than a ninja. And maybe that is going to be exactly what I want to do with him…

Anyway. I hope you like my Mod. Feel free to leave comment, even if you don’t^^