The Trade Federation experimented with many designs for the Droid Starfighter before arriving at the final version. Earlier models had a droid pilot, rather than the fighter as a droid itself. One of these was a flying saucer-like craft, which I decided to build with LEGO.
Illustrations of the fighter by Doug Chiang are found in The Art of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace, by Jonathan Bresman. Other alternate ship designs in this book will likely inspire some of my future LEGO creations.
You may notice that the middle of the model is an attempt to find an alternate use for the new tower element found in some Knights' Kingdom sets. The entire middle section can be easily lifted off to remove the droid and its blaster. The big quarter-circle bricks on the front of the model are from the old lighthouse set. |
