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Altitron — Sector Convoy - Lines
Published: 2010-12-18 04:39:28 +0000 UTC; Views: 802; Favourites: 15; Downloads: 12
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Inspired by Alphamagnus, Sector Prime is the mascot for the kitbashing resource, www.Sector70.com .He is an amalgamation of some of the more iconic character designs from the Transformers franchise.
He boasts 70 modes. How many can you come up with?
EDIT: Fixed the right foot.
- Alty
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Comments: 24
And over two years later, the Fansproject Function X-2 (not-Chromedone) toy comes out with the first use of a railroad-style multipart trench sliding-joint, where the car hood attaches. Perhaps Sector Convoy is buildable after all...
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Can you send me a link? I'd love to see it!
- Alty
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[link]
It's one of the video reviews. The link will take you to the demonstration of the chestplate attachment being slid from the upper torso block over to the crotch block, passing over the rotating waist joint in the process. The waist joint is then rotated 180 degrees, with the upper torso block now being completely detached from the chestplate.
Effectively, the attachment of parts goes from crotch block - torso block - chestplate to torso block - crotch block - chestplate. The method used is also not limited to two blocks - you could have a series of components A through Y, all linked to each other through standard joints, and slide an attached component Z all the way from A down to Y without ever actually separating from the toy. As an added advantage, it would be able to stop at any point along the path without interfering with any more than one of the A-Y joints at any time, leading to much-increased flexibility in terms of where to place components for altmodes.
On top of that, the trench which the component slides down is not necessarily limited to one component - it's more like a monorail track. You could have as many components as you wanted sliding up and down the track into suitable positions, and with T-junctions or railroad-turntable swivels in the track, you wouldn't even have to keep the components in the same order.
Finally, even though the track takes up quite a bit of space on the Fansproject toy (it's almost the whole width of the lower block), it would be comparatively minuscule on a larger toy (Leader-size, Supreme-size etc), meaning tracks could be laid all over the surface of the figure without disruption to the underlying mechanisms. In fact, you could even have components which move around on the tracks and, when they come to the end of the track, effectively provide an extension that other components could slide onto.
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I dare some poor kitbasher to come up with 70 modes.
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I don't know about getting modes out of a pre-established design, but I can get 20 or so physically realizable modes out of one toy if I can design from scratch.
It'd probably be easier to get more modes out of Sector Convoy if he was a massive partsformer, or had some kind of universal part-positioning system where nothing completely detaches but nothing's really permanently connected either...
Hmm... yes, I think I could come up with such a system, but it would need the SC toy to be huge - somewhere between Leader-size and Fort Max - and have die-cast parts in some of his joints, as well as having a truly stupendous number of individual plastic components. As in, every bit of identifiable kibble you can see in the picture would be made up of four or five parts instead of one, and they'd all be semi-independently jointed.
The instruction sheet would be a thing of insanity.
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...plus he'd be half Rubix Cube, half Lego, and half rail-type microturntables. Really cheaty for a Transformers toy, akin to being able to partsform by sliding things around each other. You could have his left arm sticking out of his right knee, for example, without too much effort.
Something similar has been done at least once in a Transformers toy (G1 Metroplex's left shoulder), but without the extra reroutable sneakiness that would pretty much destroy the constraint of having to keep part A connected to part B, which is part of what makes Transformers Transformers.
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OK, I figured out what to do with his hands as a default transformation, but I'm still trying to figure out where his cape-wings came from. I know I've seen them before somewhere - they remind me of Jetfire, or ROTF Ransack, or GoBots Water Walk...
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I don't know why your posts didn't show up in my message log, but I loved reading them! I can tell you put a lot of thought into figuring out how to actually make Sector Prime work, which is a real treat to hear. 
As for the cape-wings, they were inspired by G1 Jetfire.
- Alty
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A-ha! So, hmm. He's presumably got a jet mode, a treaded tank mode, a mode with (at least four) wheels, and possibly something reptilian or monstrous with the teeth - it'd be a pity to waste them. Then there's the easy cop-outs of a Cybertronic truck, a handgun, an AA platform, a satellite, a spaceship, and a base.
That's ten down, sixty to go. Eesh. Um... dang. Spider tank. Lab analysis equipment (Perceptor style). Heavy lifting trolley. Grasping gripper. Robotic quadruped of some kind. Robotic scorpion. Robotic bird. Cybertronian bullet train. Robotic ape. Uh... submarine or submersible research platform! Twenty!
Beetle! Six- or eight-wheeled racecar! Stationary computer terminal, audio device, or power generator (ie semifeatureless block with greeblies)! Two-headed dragon, aircraft carrier, skycrane helicopter. Give him a pair of Movie Demolishor treads somewhere and I can add communications station, rocketbike, and (of course) steamshovel or bulldozer. And, uh, winged serpent. And some kind of half-track vehicle.
OK, that's thirty-one, and I think my brain just overheated keeping track of all the parts. Plus I think I'd have to do something about that Shockwave cannon-hose... no, wait, make it jointed like Seasaurus' neck and with a sliding baseframe, and we can add "elephant" as a mode (32!), plus making it able to split up into parts of the insect legs or act as additional antennae or random spiky things, laser projectors etc.
And hmm, just got a better idea for the hand transformations, allowing two normal hands, two Shockwave-style handcannons (also usable elsewhere!), or one of each. The cannons could be generic blasters, collapsable into thrusters or random kibble, or have many other uses... the Seeker wings would need to be hinged in certain ways and the top ones Z-split... the feet would need an overlayable horizontal grid... the arm cannon would need ALL kinds of work (oh, but wait, it would also allow a Reflector-style camera altmode as #33)...
Dammit, this is the kind of thing that gnaws at me until I work out all the possibilities, and now it's one in the morning! :/
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This is the best post I've ever gotten on my page!
- Alty
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It seems I just can't keep away.
OK, done some more thinking on how to make the joint system work without leaving it prone to having bits randomly detach. Part of the problem was that I wanted any part A to be able to slide along a grooved track on part B, wind up on the end of B, and then have part C slide down the groove on B, cross over to a similar groove on part A, and keep on sliding.
And yet somehow do this without part C falling off the end of part B if part A is elsewhere on the toy at the time.
Of course, the connectors and grooves would all have to be universal, so any piece would be able to fill in for part A. And, in fact, A and C should be able to take each other's role seamlessly.
The new joint system has a simple standard mechanism in each component where the groove would otherwise terminate in empty space, as follows:
The first "part A" slides along the groove on B and pushes against the mechanism's springloaded moving piece. This piece also normally reaches back along the groove a short distance to block the hole where a component might otherwise be able to detach completely from B. While the piece is being actively pushed against, the hole in B is uncovered, allowing C to slide through it. However, piece A itself blocks all motion through the hole until it is rotated to the point where its own groove lines up with the groove in B. This allows C's connection point to pass from B to A without ever being able to detach fully from the toy as a whole.
As a bonus, every connection between any two pieces is a double balljoint with full motion. If the connection is halfway down a groove, at least one of the balljoints will still have full motion and the other will at least have full rotation. Octogonal beveling will allow some stiffness and friction-lock in the connections so the whole thing doesn't fall apart into a floppy mess.
Hmm... smaller bits of kibble would probably not have grooves themselves, so they wouldn't need a mechanism. They'd just have the same universal double-ball system allowing them to slide along the groove 'railroad' with everything else.
Aside from this system, a universal two-way friction clip would be nice to tack down free-floating kibble and provide extra stability. Basing it on a sliding spanner-shape plus the 3mm clips currently in vogue would be nice, but probably impractical outside a Supreme-sized toy.
I could do it if I used those tiny metal rods found in things like G1 Astrotrain's wings, but I'd really prefer pure plastic. Easier to make, easier to assemble. A rotating mushroom cluster takes up too much volume. A flip-out rectilinear U isn't bad if there's already a degree of alignment, but I was hoping for something universal and yet space-saving. Rectilinear scalloping works really well in two dimensions and has no moving parts, but it looks funny on the pieces when they're not connected.
Flip-out T-pieces might be the way to go. They wouldn't snap together, but they'd hook moderately firmly in many cases, which is really all that's needed. A row of T-pieces or doubled cylindrical Fs smoothing a rectilinear scallop, in particular, would allow all kinds of options.
Simpler still - 3mm I-pieces. Hookable, connectable, compatible, and able to be useful even when folded away.
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Just spent a couple of months working on a connection system which might also be of use. It lets a flat plate or face without a connector lie flat against any surface which does have one, but when two surfaces with connectors are placed together - no matter how they're rotated - they will snap together and be able to rotate around the connection point.
A second set of identical connectors will prevent the rotation, and just lock the two plastic parts together until sufficient force is applied to pull them apart.
I designed the system to replace peg-and-hole connectors (so that there would never need to be a peg permanently sticking out of one of the parts), magnetic connectors (which can slide around), and turntable peg-flip systems, which do the same thing but have to be manually converted between connected and unconnected modes. I figured that when transforming something like Sector Convoy, it'd save time if each connection point didn't have to be fiddled with.
The only problem is that each universal connector requires metal foil, bearings, and three sets of magnets, as well as plastic components. Looks like the deluxe version of SC would be a custom job only. Dang.
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Man, that sounds awesome! What's your e-mail address? Send it to me in a note. We may be able to make something happen in the future.
- Alty
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Sounds like fun! You can get me on geminii27.deviantart@vo.id.au at any time.
Hmm, I just realised a better method of transforming the front wheel covers on the truck mode for the Doubleshift model. Much better result!
As a point of interest, the Doubleshift CGI model there actually has an early prototype version of the parts-connection system I was suggesting for Sector Convoy. It uses the old version where part A would always be connected to part B no matter what, but they could slide around all over each other almost like magnets. (Sector Convoy would use the improved version where parts A and B could separate and slide around all over the entire toy.) You can see some of the grooves/slots in this image - [link] - particularly where the necks join the body and on the front of the lower body.
It'd be brilliant to see any of these systems in a physical model, either kitbashed or 3D printed. I'd be up for any chance to design the transformation guts of something that might become real.
-Gem
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That would cause admission into a mental clinic, I think.
- Alty
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I love the teeth in the midsection, but I have no idea where they're from
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It's an exaggerated idea taken from Grimlock's newer designs, with the teeth in the side of the face plate and in the torso.
- Alty
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70 modes?! Holy crap!
This design is interesting, looks like a bit of a chimera of different Transformers.
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Oh yeah. He's very much an amalgamation of some of the more iconic character designs. The idea is that the kitbashing community can use this robot mode design as a basis to create their own take on the character, thereby fleshing out all 70 alt modes that he supposedly has. Everyone gets to contribute their own take.
- Alty
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