Morgan Kinsano’s Cyclops, Game-Accurate Rebuild

While I was building the stock model I was first struck by the sizeable quantity of parts that made up this compact model and blown away by the intricacy of the build. What a fantastic design! Hats of to the Mega set design team member responsible for this set. The completed build was very pose-worthy and rock solid stable with only a few minor exceptions. The intricate little flame cannon parts were easily knocked out of alignment and the "toes" have a tendency to fall off when posing the mech. With two grade-school children in the house I've been enlisted to help with the builds of many of the competition's animation-themed Mech builds and Kinsano's Cycleops is just so much better a design!

After I’d basked in the awesomeness of the stock build for awhile, I googled some Halo Wars 2 concept art pics and zoomed in on some grainy in-game screen grabs depicting Lt Col M. Kinsano’s personal weapon of fiery mass destruction. While I play Halo Wars 2 regularly, the in-game models are pretty tiny! I wanted to see just how accurately MCX had depicted her in-game leader unit vehicle. Well it turns out Mega did a pretty good job. Now the economics of the toy biz means that a Mega set designer must work within a piece count limit in-order to hit a specific price target. As a result there were a few areas of the model that perhaps were over-simplified, or some detailing work left undone. So after a year long sabbatical from block customs, I decided to give it a go.

Getting the Mech's chest right required a pretty heroic effort. In order to practically duplicate what I did here with a lot of brick modification and some "Kragle", MCX would have had to created some additional set-specific parts. To replicate the armored chin-plate, this one-off part could have been pinned to matching holes in one of those three new (AM76453xx) parts used for the hinged folding pectoral chest armor and codpiece. There would also have needed to be a set-specific multi-angled back plate created to underpin the slope assembly I added between those new pectoral armor parts. My backing plate was laboriously created by cutting, filing several small plate sections to create the requisite angles and then gluing them together.

***BTW, the Kinsano mini-fig’s boots feature protruding kneepads that are a pain in the butt when fitting her inside both the stock mech model and my modded version. Carefully cutting the protruding bits off and then sanding the spot on her boots smooth made everything work so much better!

With the chest armor figured out, I added a few slopes to transition from the chest to the shoulders smoothly. The stock model’s exposed studs and rough transition here had to have been a cost saving measure ‘cuz the fix was simple and obvious. Similarly obvious was the addition of the missing hoses between the fuel tanks and each flame thrower- Doooh! However, Mega’s cool looking segmented hose (molded plastic part) choice for the hoses didn’t work well between the fuel tanks and flamethrowers. I switched ‘em all out for rubber versions. Then I kind of went to town on the flame throwers. I added a bunch of bling bits to better represent the rats nest of tubing and whatnot that make up the in-game model and I made a minor parts substitution in order to stabilize the flame nozzle. I also added a couple of parts to fake the clamps which secure the flame throwers to the mech’s arms in-game. There is a bunch of spots where I added various types of tiles and a slope or two, in order to cover up unsightly exposed studs or obvious un-capped holes in the fuel tanks. Finally I added a couple of stickers from my stash just to bling the model out a little further.