By VinceHoffman
Mar 12, 2019
Well it took me a long while to get around to this one- LOL! Over several years I’d purchased a couple of the Halo 5 Scorpion Sting sets but never actually got around to building this 2015 model. They were all scrapped for camo green custom build fodder and then used to build among other things, my custom M808 Halo Reach Scorpion- LOL! While the Halo 5 themed Scorpion’s Sting set was an improvement on the (really) rudimentary camo gold v1 (Halo Wars) Scorpion, it was still a bit of an ugly duckling IMHO. A few weeks ago, I was going through a box full of accumulated unbuilt sets in Ziploc bags which I’d purchased from several other Block fans over several the years. Among several Countdown/UNSC Sabre sets was… yet another Halo 5 Scorpion. What the heck I thought, I’ll build it and see if it looks better in person than the box art and internet pics suggest…
First the good stuff, the stock main gun turret was really clever as was the core design of the tread bogies. However the too-narrow hull, protruding machine gun mount and way too much missing detail (particularly when compared with contemporary Mega Construx COD sets) left a lot of opportunity for improvement. Here is what I did.
The rebuilt hull is two studs wider. This accommodates the side-by-side offset of the driver’s hatch and pintle mount machine gun and kinda/sorta represents the M820’s 28 foot width vs its length of 33 feet. While I retained Mega’s splayed outward stock rear hull design, the internal structure of the hull build was completely rethought. Mega’s design was commendable from a standpoint of just how few blocks they managed to employ and yet still create a stable build. Differences in my rebuild necessitated a lot more blocks. For example my substitution of four 4x10 plates for the one big 8x16 one Mega employed as the baseplate of the hull. Each plate-to-plate transition and the wider unsupported span required additional brick infrastructure to stabilize properly. I re-worked the gradual slope of the hull from front to turret at the same time as I got rid of the hinged hatch for a game-accurate sliding version. At first I was convinced the cylinder used for the pintle mount MG turret was simply too tall and considered cutting it down some. But after building up the hull immediately in front of and behind the MG turret as per the in-game renders, the remaining visible portion of the cylinder looked about right. All the absent detail was added to the rear of half of the hull and I crafted some turbine engine details behind the hinged engine hatch that made more sense than the storage cavity of the stock build. I’m particularly pleased with how the sliding driver’s hatch and trio of headlights worked out. (Before anyone asks, all the head and taillight lenses are simply studs carefully cut from translucent red, orange, and clear plates. They friction fit into the recess of each off my headlight housings as studs normally do.)
With the tread bogies I reversed the clever stock asymmetric design of the top decks to expose the visually more interesting (and game accurate) asymmetric detail. Then I re-worked all the surface detailing to better represent the in-game renders. After accumulating a bunch of firebase sets over a few years for block fodder, I had lots of the funky 4x5x2/3rds modified slopes and the 2x4x1 curvy sloped “engine intake” parts both used on the stock front bogey design. So I didn’t lose much sleep over cutting up and Kragle-ing together some new game-accurate front fenders.
Alright so on to the main gun turret… Would you believe there were no fundamental changes? LOL! While I found Mega’s overall turret design really aesthetically pleasing, there were lots of missing details and the rear left side of the turret was just plain shaped wrong. My version is better but still not perfect due to the shape of the modified guardrail plates I used to replicate the handrails on the left side of the turret. I really liked the ability to elevate and depress the main turret’s coaxial machine gun barrel. I did drill out the central stud of a couple of 1x1 plates and a 1x2 symmetric slope block in order to armor the machine gun port and hide the silver hinge mechanism. The OCD brick builder in me really wishes Mega had created a new one-off mold for a game accurate canon barrel. I explored the possibility of creating a 3D printed version but ultimately ended up creating my own hexagonal cross section barrel. An entire day's efforts were expended there with lots of cutting, gluing, sanding, and polishing.
MB’s take on the pintle mount machine gun was really rudimentary. The first step in the rebuild was coming up with a far better looking design using stock MB parts. Later on I decided to mod a few of the stock parts used in my MG re-design to really capture the look of the in-game MG.
First the good stuff, the stock main gun turret was really clever as was the core design of the tread bogies. However the too-narrow hull, protruding machine gun mount and way too much missing detail (particularly when compared with contemporary Mega Construx COD sets) left a lot of opportunity for improvement. Here is what I did.
The rebuilt hull is two studs wider. This accommodates the side-by-side offset of the driver’s hatch and pintle mount machine gun and kinda/sorta represents the M820’s 28 foot width vs its length of 33 feet. While I retained Mega’s splayed outward stock rear hull design, the internal structure of the hull build was completely rethought. Mega’s design was commendable from a standpoint of just how few blocks they managed to employ and yet still create a stable build. Differences in my rebuild necessitated a lot more blocks. For example my substitution of four 4x10 plates for the one big 8x16 one Mega employed as the baseplate of the hull. Each plate-to-plate transition and the wider unsupported span required additional brick infrastructure to stabilize properly. I re-worked the gradual slope of the hull from front to turret at the same time as I got rid of the hinged hatch for a game-accurate sliding version. At first I was convinced the cylinder used for the pintle mount MG turret was simply too tall and considered cutting it down some. But after building up the hull immediately in front of and behind the MG turret as per the in-game renders, the remaining visible portion of the cylinder looked about right. All the absent detail was added to the rear of half of the hull and I crafted some turbine engine details behind the hinged engine hatch that made more sense than the storage cavity of the stock build. I’m particularly pleased with how the sliding driver’s hatch and trio of headlights worked out. (Before anyone asks, all the head and taillight lenses are simply studs carefully cut from translucent red, orange, and clear plates. They friction fit into the recess of each off my headlight housings as studs normally do.)
With the tread bogies I reversed the clever stock asymmetric design of the top decks to expose the visually more interesting (and game accurate) asymmetric detail. Then I re-worked all the surface detailing to better represent the in-game renders. After accumulating a bunch of firebase sets over a few years for block fodder, I had lots of the funky 4x5x2/3rds modified slopes and the 2x4x1 curvy sloped “engine intake” parts both used on the stock front bogey design. So I didn’t lose much sleep over cutting up and Kragle-ing together some new game-accurate front fenders.
Alright so on to the main gun turret… Would you believe there were no fundamental changes? LOL! While I found Mega’s overall turret design really aesthetically pleasing, there were lots of missing details and the rear left side of the turret was just plain shaped wrong. My version is better but still not perfect due to the shape of the modified guardrail plates I used to replicate the handrails on the left side of the turret. I really liked the ability to elevate and depress the main turret’s coaxial machine gun barrel. I did drill out the central stud of a couple of 1x1 plates and a 1x2 symmetric slope block in order to armor the machine gun port and hide the silver hinge mechanism. The OCD brick builder in me really wishes Mega had created a new one-off mold for a game accurate canon barrel. I explored the possibility of creating a 3D printed version but ultimately ended up creating my own hexagonal cross section barrel. An entire day's efforts were expended there with lots of cutting, gluing, sanding, and polishing.
MB’s take on the pintle mount machine gun was really rudimentary. The first step in the rebuild was coming up with a far better looking design using stock MB parts. Later on I decided to mod a few of the stock parts used in my MG re-design to really capture the look of the in-game MG.