Pink is a good hi-vis colour when you’re working with grey and black and white a lot. Clearly the pink highlights are to help the dockyard crews.
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I also backed that KS! A lot of the chatter on their pages was how to get lots of the hard to find pieces, as you said, and I never got to tier-1 because I would need to figure out how to get the pieces needed.
Edit: Thank goodness for searchable email archives, I can found and re-downloaded the Intercept Zero PDF.
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I always liked this idea, just waiting for the government to change their advice to;
Go to your parents house to get a crate of lego > Control the Virus > Save lives.
But I don’t think that’s going to happen until Thursday.
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Here’s my Mobile Frame Zero tactical starter set. Ranged in yellow, CQB in red:
They are, L to R: Ginsu (Scout), Kevin (Fire Support), Sarge (Command & Control), and Dead-Eye (Sniper).
And the melee-equipped Bravo Squad of B.A. Baracus (Giant Mace), Harpoon (Rocket Javelin), Hatchetman (Enormous Axe), and Daishō (Double Swords):
It’s stuff like this that gets them banned from the O-Club.
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Dude! Those are amazing!
Have you actually played MFZ? Is it any good? There are Mobile Frames available in MFZ:IO as well, although they behave like fighter squadrons now (which makes sense?).
I’m honestly not sure how I feel about their inclusion in the game (especially since I haven’t actually played it yet!). On the one hand, it would be disingenuous not to include them, since fighter-craft absolutely dominate modern naval warfare and it’s a reasonable extrapolation that they will continue to do so in space. On the other hand, I really like pre-fighter-era ship warfare the best thematically… give me Battlefleet Gothic or Age of Sails or even Star Wars Armada (although the fighters in SW:A can be a significant factor, they have capped point-maximums, which means you have to field big ships and usually your capital ships dominate the field… usually).
Plus, the Mobile Frames in MFZ:IO are tiny and look very fiddly to build (but, again, haven’t tried yet).
Finished another ship this morning, but I can’t get to the base-plates without dumping out the whole bin of LEGO I have, and since my partner works in the same space I build in (the game room has been converted into office space since it has the largest table)… I’d probably better wait until she’s not working before I do that. She can get… touchy… about me playing while she works.
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Have you found a source of Intercept Orbit builds/instructions besides those in the KS book? I can find plenty of mech frames for MFZ, but spaceship instructions are harder to find.
There are a few on the official MFZ forum (link-linky-link), but they’re not really instructions so much as “lookit this awesome thing I did”.
Which, cool, some of them are pretty awesome. But utility… not so much.
Anyway, here’s that ship I finished earlier today, finally on its base (which, technically, is the wrong size, but I’ll fix that tomorrow as I continue to organize my LEGO and build neat stuff!).
I don’t know about those two orange pieces near the engines. I wanted it to kinda look “glow”-y, like the engine housing was hot, but I don’t think it really works. I’ll probably swap them out for dark-gray tomorrow when I switch the base. It’s too bad I couldn’t connect the top piece to the back, I think it would’ve added a lot of stability, but I need an L piece that’s a receptor, and I don’t have any that I can find. They seem to be quite rare these days (they used to be rather common in older sets, as memory serves). Oh well.
Two down… four more to go, I think? There’s abouts.
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I like the orange, if it helps. Maybe as Health and Safety warning for mechanics?
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Alas, no. These fearsome combatants bide their time guarding a shelf full of paperbacks in my spare room. A room now so full of junk that it should be renamed “Hoarder’s Corner”. Regardless, I like the idea of spaceship combat better than giant impractical anthropomorphic fighting machines anyway. As a youngster, I would invariably repurpose my Lego sets to microscale spacecraft, so it’s funny to think that I was training myself for work at the “Lego Orbital Construction Yards” all along. 
I’m at work right now, but I will post some of my past creations for your perusal later (the ships I have built are too large for convenient gameplay I think, but the scale is about right).
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Here you go. Pardon the grime on them, but they were encased in dust from when I tossed them in a box from my move a few years ago. I Swiffered them as best I could, but they require further cleaning that I’m not inclined to do right now.
The first is a sleek “Bird-of-Prey” style mothership that carries two parasite fast attack corvettes under its main armament cooling vane “wings”. I sort of conceived these as a secret project by hard-pressed guerrilla separatists that had the resources to build a single formidable warship that could take on their numerous enemies on an equal footing. Sort of like “Da Beltahz” from The Expanse.
Next up we have this:
This design was conceived as an all-purpose warship able to engage enemy capital ships and/or launch naval landing forces in a planetary assault. Thus the long and deep hull. (Yes, I know. I really like cooling vanes.)
Lastly, I have this:
These are the massive dreadnoughts of an unnamed spacefaring superpower (which I will call the Boydesian Stellar Imperium, for lack of a better term 
) They are designed to obliterate their opponents with massive, forward-facing main batteries able to punch their way through even the stoutest deflector shields.
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Oooh, I love them! That Dreadnaught in particular is mint… although the little “launchable corvettes” are amazing too!
Damn fine work, sir.
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Are you from Derbyshire by any chance? Thats the only place I’ve ever heard ‘mint’ used that way
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I am from West-West Derbyshire… also known as “Canada”. 
I don’t know where I picked it up from, and I don’t think it’s super common in Ontario. But I read a lot and watch a lot of international television (Japanese, British, American, Australian)…
So you now know one not-Central-Derbyshire person who uses “mint” in that way.
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In New England, if you’re my age, superlative things were/are referred to as being “wicked mint”.
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Maybe its an age thing then and just because i was in Derbyshire until my early 20s, it just SEEMS that that is where it comes from an actually is just people roughly my age group (which is now mid-40s)!
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Random question, but since you built the Zealous, what is the third part in step 7 on page 45? The one they use to turn a 1x1 Round Brick to width 2?
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Lemme check real quick…
Ah! That. I didn’t. I just left them as 1x1 rounds (my ship builds have several substitutions).
I think it’s supposed to be a tire like a 50945 or a 30028, but I couldn’t be bothered. I don’t have many tires, and I certainly wasn’t going to buy one just for a starship to make the engines look a bit chonkier.
As it is, I just left the 1x1 round peg under the “thrust”-glow. It looks pretty solid!
The big issue I’m having is the number of 3956s I’m supposed to have (2x2x2 90 degree pieces with a “receptor” on one side… all of my are “outies” that connect to other pieces, not “innies” that allow other pieces to connect to them). My several-thousand-piece collection has exactly zero, so I’ve been forced to come up with some creative alternatives (none are as strong, sadly).
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A tire was my guess, maybe a 30028?
I’m surprised you don’t have 3956s. From the Lego I had as a kid, I had several of those but none of the other brackets (like 44728, 99207, and 99781).
I am currently compiling a list of parts used in various Intercept Orbit and Rapid Attack instructions I found so I can go shopping on BrickLink. It’s a slow process, but I’d be willing to share here when I’m done.
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