NEXOGON: The Inexorable

Tim Goddard (Rogue Bantha on Flickr) is certainly no stranger to Neo-Classic Space creations but our parts festival using the new hexagonal LEGO® part 27255 is pushing him to greater heights. His latest ship, The Inexorable, now takes off...

For this build I started with a tablescrap (a small build, normally of no particular purpose, a bit like a doodle) and that turned into an engine. More detail on that in a moment, but first let's look at the main body of the craft.

As I tend to do when building ships I started at the front and worked my way back (other than the engines, which I had already built in this case). The new Transparent Yellow Batman cockpit (Element ID 6170827|Design ID 21849) has been top of my list of new parts to use for a while and now seemed like the ideal time.

After deciding to mount the cockpit backwards I spent some time building a frame for it at a suitably jaunty angle, once satisfied I built a very rough box to sketch out the main body of the ship and attached the cockpit frame and the engines. Now all I had to do was fill in the blanks! Here, for example, is the undercarriage.

The head section required a lot of work, the transition from this to the main body took a lot of work and only really came together when I stumbled across a pair of interesting old 3x3x2 corner slopes (Design ID 2463).

I have discovered over time that to make a ship model work, you have to move away from right angles and that is why the back section angles inwards towards the roof.

The windows were a serendipitous discovery. I am not sure where this came from but my mum, who has never shown much interest in LEGO building, wanted to build a house and bought the set 10703 Creative Builder. I was round one Sunday and I came across the 1x2x2 window pane newly in Transparent Yellow (Element ID 6013709 | Design ID 86209/60601, which I've since found out is also in The LEGO Batman Movie 70903 The Riddler Riddle Racer). Some quick Bricklinking for a few of these and some suitable frames in Bright Blue [TLG]/Blue [BL] (Element ID 4622587 | Design ID 60592, which were only available in the 2011 set Alien Conquest 7066 Earth Defense HQ) and a few days later and I had some lovely windows, thanks mum!

Now, back to the engine tablescrap that inspired this build. It is built using three panels which attach at each end to a Nexogon.

The panels start studs-up (towards the Nexogon) using a 1x1 tile clip. It then transitions to a central bracket/plate section to reverse the stud direction to connect to the second Nexogon. I then started to add detail to this new shape with greebles and pieces to smooth out the outlines a little and fill in the inside spaces to solidify the structure. Once I had one complete, another two soon followed. Then they were left to one side.

After two weeks of detailing and shaping the Inexorable shuttle was ready for launch.

But that did not use up that many Nexogons, so I built on. The solar communications array is simple but shows up the interesting hexagonal and triangular possibles of our new favourite piece.

But one of the receiver dishes came loose just as I was about to photograph the model! Luckily the Inexorable shuttle was on hand with a crew of specialist communications technicians who as I type are working on the problem.

If you are reading this article rest assured that data transfer from the Zycon V orbiting the moon of Titan are working perfectly.

READ MORE: See how Luc Byard used the same cockpit piece in his Nexogon starglider

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