SPACE POLICE
Bio-cup 2024. I try to keep things casual in the Bio-cup preliminary rounds, so I went with a simple concept as usual in 2024. The theme was "Space". You know what has "space" in the name? Space Police (III)! I love that theme so I decided to do a little homage to it by building a space policeman. Not much in the way of WIP photos for this one, sorry.
Black, white, and grey with blue and red lights were the name of the color game, so I decided to layer (not totally consistently) white on grey on black on the space suit. The idea was that black was the more flexible base material, mostly only visible on joints, with grey as the tougher outer structural material in static sections and white forming the large extra cladding plates for greater protection.
Actual building started with classic chrome faceted dome for the head/visor, which I then just kinda stuck on top of a grey Hero Factory paw piece for the chest 'cause it seemed like it might work. I wanted wings because wings are cool and a jetpack with wings for atmospheric flight seemed appropriate for a space policeman, plus it gave me an excuse to use the stickered technic panels from one of my favorite sets which helpfully say "police" right on them. I initially placed the jets in a lower spot in some terribly misguided attempt to make them prominent, but in the one WIP photo below you can see they destroyed the waist silhouette, as one crit partner helpfully pointed out, so later I moved them further up the back. Now they're barely visible from the front but continue to wreak havoc on the center of mass. That's what I call a lose-lose (but did I get rid of them? Of course not). I do skip them when displaying at cons, though.
From there I added the white "harness"/armor over the chest piece and threw some standard arms on. Tires for the waist so the section would look flexible and more white arches over the groin to matches the harness on the chest. Thighs were pretty simple with more smooth white cladding over a slightly busier grey bulk. I am terrible with shins so I struggled slightly with them, but I went with the little technic panels flaring out like big boot tops/shin guards (this is an old technique that I first stole from MitchBuilds here) and built the rest of the shin around them.
A galactic law enforcer of a fascist human empire needs a gun to enforce with, so a gun he received. I'm not great with guns and after fiddling with a more revolver looking thing I repurposed it into this ray gun with whatever those are sticking out the sides. Side note, the teeth on this piece do not have any clutch on bars. This gun barely holds together.
The true essence of Space Police III, however, isn't just cool space dudes. It's cool space dudes brutally oppressing the alien citizens that have been labeled criminals by the ruling human class. So obviously I needed an alien for him to be violently oppressing.
I initially tried a very goofy looking alien to sell the satire, but building the rest of the body wasn't going great and opinions were mixed on the tone so I simplified again down to a mass of tentacles bursting out of a manhole. One emergency Bricklink order later and I had it done. I had in the meantime also built a cool blood splatter effect which was intended to replace the goofy aliens eyeball, but could still be nicely reused on one of the tentacles.
Now just to put them together. I wanted to replicate the pose of the officer from this Cyberpunk 2077 teaser trailer, that somewhat casual, ruthless confidence, which required some pretty subtle joint angles but I think it turned out well. I did add a waist (well, more like pelvis) joint to get a little bit of the upper torso lean. Threw together a very basic base since I was starting to feel a time crunch, lined up the gun with the unlucky tentacle, and strung up some lights for that final bit of flair.
