My telephone number is being used for spoofing apparently, so if I call you and I don’t sound like myself, while asking for your credit card details, PIN number, waist size or other personal details, please just hang up. Tech support says there’s nothing I can do, but I reported the issue with my carrier, – the average time “they” typically use a number like this is 2 weeks :S
MC Styling for Poulsen Motors
A friend of mine, Torben Poulsen, has created his own electric MC brand and is currently marketing his first motorcycle via his website here – I thought the bike looked interesting and suggested I could do a styling pitch for it, just to expand on where the design could go in the future.
The design I came up with is a simplistic retro futuristic approach that covers the central components of the bike. It adds legacy style gauges where the tank cap would normally sit and lowers the handlebar to allow for a more sporty style rider position.
You can inspect the new design here
Electric vehicles are often measured on range and efficiency, in this case the styling could help achieve slightly better aerodynamics, but it in order to be fully efficient, a wind screen and other alterations would be necessary to properly include the rider in the overall airflow.
Having a tachometer isn’t really necessary on an electric motorbike, but since it connects to the legacy feel it’s included, in this case it’s purely an aesthetic parameter that measures the revolutions of the electric engine.
It’s going to be interesting to see where the design goes from here, Poulsen Motors have expressed interest in taking the design further, so let’s see. As an added benefit my design students will be able to use this as an interesting foundation for their upcoming electric vehicle design class 🙂
Holidays, Void Crew and LEGO
During the recent holidays I started building Void Crew models just for entertainment purposes, but I quickly ran out of bricks the right color and size so I took the project online where I found LeoCAD
( freeware LEGO builder from 1997, that still runs great on any machine ) you can find it here.
The project became way more ambitious when I suddenly had access to unlimited legacy bricks, so I decided to build a version of the Metem Destroyer from Void Crew.
Scale wise it’s not really big enough for minifigures, but it was an interesting challenge to interpolate the design 
and there’s some silly choices in there, especially the airlock, which is a screen door brick I think
Anyway, I just wanted to share the result here if anyone else is both a Void Crew and LEGO fan and want to keep building on the model I made or create their own. LeoCAD is free and the native format is .ldr – You should be able to use it if I upload it to a drive link here
I suppose next step is to go and create a bigger model that will allow for minifigures inside OR go and order the bricks for this one and try building it RL – anyway, have a great 2024 ya’ll 🙂
Void Crew is live!
So what’s been happening lately?
Well for the last 1.5 years I’ve been hired as an external 3D artist, working on hard surface designs for a 2 – 4 player Coop space pew pew FPS adventure game. It released on Steam the 7th of September and it’s a lot of fun to play, you can try it out for yourself here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1063420/Void_Crew/
Later, I’m gonna compile a few examples of what my involvement was on the project and see if I can get it cleared for public viewing, but for now, here’s the launch trailer 🙂
F/A-20A Hammerhead
A while ago a Royal Danish Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, “TIB” Guilbert, contacted me about making a prototype stealth fighter to demonstrate a concept he described as being a small, but very maneuverable jet fighter with limited stealth capabilities. I did several drafts and kept the project going as a fun pass time when I wasn’t teaching or working with hard deadlines. During June / July 2022 I discovered there was a possibility to implement the model I had created in MS Flight 2020 – and now it’s almost fully functional – it’s lacking a few things in the cockpit, but exterior wise it’s pretty cool – even comes with thrust vectoring and multi rudder controls. Needless to say the Lt. Col. is very happy with the result 🙂
You can check out the F/A-20A Hammerhead exterior test here, as long as you forgive me for being a super bad pilot when I’m steering the plane from that angle
The aircraft design itself is based on the YF-23 ( you can tell by the pelican tail ) the F-16 ( small size, big engine ) the SR-71 ( the chines around the nose ) and the F/A-18 both in multi rudder functionality, but I also had to lend a great deal from the F/A-18 in MSFS to emulate a jet fighter, especially the afterburner. – and finally the F-35 ( thrust vectoring idea from the B model, nozzle design and the diverterless intakes ). Here’s a few sketches and pics from the development process:
Here’s a preliminary study on how the control surfaces would work in conjunction with each other:
3D printed version, I really wanted to know if I could make a DIY kit that would allow users to print their own, paint and display it as a model at home – the landing gear was the hardest part, but it works 🙂
I also did an airflow study, sadly the digital wind tunnel was only able to emulate relatively slow speeds, so the study only really shows that the design would generate lift while on the approach ( which is ofcourse, a good thing 🙂 ):
I’ll leave y’all with a short desert test flight 🙂
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