The first and only LEGO Project Hail Mary set features an intricate mechanism for the centrifugal motion, and designing it was anything but easy.
Whether you know the source material or not, the primary play feature in
The designer behind the set explained the involved process that went into developing this mechanism in a recent roundtable interview, and you may just appreciate the feature more after reading what he had to say.
"There's this feature of the centrifugal motion that is important to the movie, so we wanted to see if we could implement that at all," said designer Nathan Heigert. "The ship has these three components of the motion, where first it extends the crew compartment, then at a certain point, it rotates 90 degrees, and that's when the centrifugal motion kicks in.
"I was aware, based on reference, that that was everything that was part of the motion of the ship, but I wasn't sure how to do that. Right off the bat, I took some stabs at it, and you can imagine the inelegant versions, where it was three different inputs that I had to start off with for initiating all these different motions. Of course, that could demonstrate its potential, but it's not as clean or as simple as something we'd like to put out there.
"I took a couple of weeks to try out different ideas, and then this version occurred to me in a moment of inspiration, where I had a sense of how I could compare the extension with the rotation in a pretty simple way. So I made a sketch model of that, I brought it over to Jamie and my associate lead, and we all decided that it looked like the right approach.
"At that point, it was just a matter of refining the mechanism, bringing in all the different forces of balance, weight and distribution, and just working out how to get that as efficient and smooth as possible."
As challenging as the mechanism was to get working correctly, another aspect of the build related to the feature that required a great deal of effort to get right was how to most effectively hide this mechanism from view. Doing so would improve the display value of the model, but the team still wanted the spaceship to be interactive.
"In the thinking of the design, we knew that we would have to rely a lot on Technic components just for structural soundness, and to effectively drive this function," Nathan continued later in the roundtable. "I briefly explored how far we could go with pure System parts, and concluded that we couldn't rely on that based on the necessities of the model.
"I hope that it doesn't impact it visually too badly, because we have a facade on the front of System bricks, and then the ship itself, which is the focus of the model. While you drive the function, that's what you're going to be focusing on, and less on what's happening in the back."
The result of these efforts is a visually appealing and functional recreation of the ship from the film, which we'll see on the big screen next month. LEGO Icons
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