Factory: J4-KL "Jakal"

When the streets of Hartipion were flung into chaos after the UMFL forcefully interfered, the locals once again proved their resourcefulness by modifying some old, broken, rusted out Jakals from some of the first colonization ships. The wreck of The Potentiate was hundreds of kilometers from city limits, but its hangars were mostly intact and their contents still viable. The refurbished Jakals kept their name, and it led only to confusion by the UMFL when the archaic frames took to arms and began to skirmish on the streets. Presenting the J4-KL "Jakal."

This build comes off the heels of Gen Con 2018, a tabletop gaming convention here in Indianapolis, Indiana. I started work on this day one, and by the time the con was over, I was done. I actually decided on the theme before I had even started, I knew that I wanted something with a stylized head and pointy ears, and after working on the legs for a few hours and many iterations,  I think the whole thing came out okay. The legs use mixels joints, but the arms are more classical linkages.

The gun is something you may have seen on some other designs, I have a folder for importable guns to throw on my frames. The chest piece was actually something that I iterated quite a bit. This is probably the sixth or seventh chest piece or design, but in the end I went with a single piece.

The head is made from what I think is a ninjago weapon, some kind of chakram or something. The shoulders use those blades which I have been wanting to use quite badly for a long time.

I found that there were quite a few times when putting a single stud covering a spindly looking rod piece made it look thicker. I used this technique on the arms, as well as previous iterations of the legs.

You can see from the stripped down view that his design isn't that crazy, and I use the mixels in his knees to allow for flat foot-placement. His pelvis is made from an engine block, and his upper torso can rotate and hinge. His arms are pretty basic, and his torso is a single travis brick. His neck is a single stud jumper, with a hand clip that holds the aforementioned weapon thing. The Pneumatic T's for hips are some of my favorite pieces of all time, and I think they worked okay here.

I was kind of going for a gritty look, not dissimilar to the current day desert tan military vehicles that the U.S. military uses. This meant lots of tan, which I normally am not a fan of. This build also challenged me with scale, since early iterations were disproportionate or off scale. For much of this build, I had a 7p human standing next to the frame to help me design it.

Fun note, I was working on this primarily in public at a convention, and people often came up to me to ask what I was doing or to watch me. It was really fun to see people's eyes explode when they saw their first tiny robot. Don't worry, as soon as someone asked me about it I showed them other (Better) builds. During the convention, something amazing and Kevin Bacon-y happened. One degree of Newman, I guess. I was sitting and eating some food when a girl named Erika asked me for directions to a panel. After I showed her the map and gave directions, she asked what I played. I said "Oh, just regular DnD, maybe Mobile Frame Zero." Without skipping a beat, she goes "You know MFZ?" I was stunned. I was like "Yeah? They don't run any games at this con, though. How do you know it?" And she goes "Oh, I share a booth with Joshua A.C. Newman every PAX. They always have a few tables playing it there. I have his info, do you want to talk to him?" I was blown away, as what are the odds that this sort of connection would happen in the most random way possible? "I'm good, we've talked over twitter, but that's really awesome, what do you do?" And she's like "Oh, I make games and write too." So hey, check her out. Link on her name above.

That's about it for today,

As always, files are free to download from my bricklink baseplate.

Also, I'm still working on refining (and frankly fixing) the hacking variant, hopefully I can get a working copy out soon.

Thanks for stopping by!

Dismissed.