The New Black: Weapon No. 11

I screwed up when I sent the builders the parts for The New Black; I omitted one of the most interesting new elements I had chosen! So I guess it is up to me to tell you about the piece that the LEGO® Group have named "Weapon No. 11" (Element ID 6134781 | Design ID 24144).

I'm not a big fan of guns (toy or otherwise) but have really taken to this piece. The BrickLink name for it gives a couple of clues as to why it is so interesting: "Minifig, Weapon Gun, Blaster with Recessed Studs on Sides and Inside Axle Holder".  It's coated in connection points of many kinds. Those "Studs on Sides" face in opposite directions, making it a 180° SNOT brick, and the fact they are recessed permits a 3.18 bar connection too. The "Inside Axle Holder", within the barrel of the gun, obviously takes an axle. You can also connect a 3.18 bar into an axle holder, which in this instance means the gun's handle inserts into the barrel. This turns the gun into a fun building element, as evidenced in the above picture of my Neutron Assimilator.

The angle between the handle and barrel is around 110°, I think a little over that, so unfortunately connecting five together does not create a perfect pentagon (which requires angles of 108°). Here I used two other parts from The New Black selection to create the final angle.

Luckily I met up with one of The New Black builders, Huw Millington, fairly soon after posting the parts and so I gave him some of these guns. He incorporated them into one of the wonderful "beasties" he created for this parts festival, making use of the fact that the barrel can also take a stud. Let's enjoy that beastie again!

This means the barrel can also be connected to the side studs of another gun, at 90°. Playing with this connection (and perhaps inspired by the Ice Planet Cube that Tim Goddard made for one of our previous parts festivals) I created this cube frame with some angled sides.

I was now on a bit of a Space Gun construction frenzy. Using just guns and 3.18 bars I created a frame that reminded me of a bay window...

... and so I made a spaceship window. A Blacktron one.

It wasn't very successful but with a more concerted effort this could be quite effective. Filling in the frame with other LEGO parts deformed the frame because I wanted to use another pair of parts from The New Black, the left and right 2x2 27° wedge plates (Design IDs 24299 and 24307).

At time of writing, Weapon No.11 appears in four LEGO Super Heroes sets: 76044 Clash of the Heroes, 76046 Heroes of Justice: Sky High Battle, 76050 Crossbones' Hazard Heist and 76053 Gotham City Cycle Chase, and has also just arrived in The LEGO Batman Movie 70901 Mr. Freeze Ice Attack (which also contains some great new recolours in Medium Blue... just sayin').

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