The Return of Blacktron! (Part 2)

Astrid’s Starfighter might be fast and stealthy, but an interstellar crime syndicate needs also some serious firepower to run their business. This is where the Blacktron Marauder comes into play: a small, but heavily armed corvette. Ideal for lightning fast attacks that hammer down your shields and have you facing a boarding commando taking every item of value from your ship, before you even realize what just happened.

The Blacktron Marauder.

The Marauder features a heavy twin-blaster cannon at the front and two blasters mounted at and powered by the ships large engines, which give it an impressive damage outfit for its size.

Due to a lack of neon-yellow canopy-pieces, as it would be proper for Blacktron, I went for using the Space-Police ones instead. The colour-clash isn’t too bad and the red gives the ships a pretty gloomy look too. So if you need a “canon-friendly” explanation: lets just assume they have stolen them!

It also has a spacious cockpit with two seats for the pilot and his weapon-system-operator behind him.

The Blacktron Marauder with the space-bike docked.

Additionally, a smaller space-bike is docked at the rear, ready for its launch.

Swooshing off to cause mayhem and destruction!

He is an expert-pilot (though he prefers the term “biker”) and loves buzzing through space and over the surfaces of planets with way too high speed to be safe and harass everything that comes into his sights. Just think Hells Angels in space and you get the idea.

He is so cool: flying through the eternal darkness of space wearing shades. Of course they are cybernetically enhanced with improved vision, targeting HUD and radiation protection, but that’s nothing his helmet couldn’t do as well. He really just wears them for the looks.

With my Blacktron ships I continued the direction I took for my classic-space MOCs: A mix of conventional techniques from the heyday of the themes with additional modern elements. Since a good part of my Lego collection is from the 90s, this technique works pretty well for me. I’d hate to see all the pieces unused and it just feels right to put them together again after so much time. And I admit, I deeply enjoy having so many more Lego pieces now. Finally I can build all the cool stuff I just could dream about in the old days!^^

Sadly not every Minifigure of my collection did survive. A good number of space-related ones are missing and I have no idea what could have happened to them. Luckily my Blacktrons had only small losses, which is good, since I didn’t have that many in the first place!

You may also have noticed that I swapped the visors between Blacktron 1 and 2. I did that to make visually more compatible with each other. Blacktron 2 was just too cheerful really. Now their Minifigures look more sinister (a bit like stormtroopers, yes I know^^), while the Blacktron 1 guys get some individualism yet still look sleek and dangerous. This is something I utterly love with modern Lego: the variety and expressiveness of their faces. You can create some real characters now. I enjoy spending quite some time swapping heads around (and hair pieces of course) to just hit the right note for a Minifigure.

Blacktron is b(l)ack! As a mix of paramilitary crime syndicate and interstellar biker-gang!

In this case the all-black Blacktrons are the specialists for “boots-on-the-ground” assignments, while the white-ish ones are the experts in space-ship operations, cyber warfare and other activities, where you don’t get your hands too dirty. Additionally to the regular Blacktron-member there are also two androids. The one on the left is – as you can see – more high-tech focused with his jetpack and arm attachment. The one to the right is my homage to Yul Brynner’s gunslinger robot from Westworld. He is the sort of shady character you would find at a certain cantina on a certain desert planet. And trust me, he doesn’t cares about droid-scanners and is ready to perforate everyone who does!