Heinlein's Gay Deciever - In LEGO® Bricks
I began the project by re-reading Number of the Beast yet again - this time noting any and all descriptions of Gay. This included bits of dialogue and story that would let me infer even more details - my only hope if I wanted something fairly accurate.
The first thing I realized is that Gay was a lot bigger than I had been picturing her. Far from my idea of a semi-compact car, Gay was closer to a jet in scale. That gave me hope - LEGO® mini-figures aren't exactly svelte, and knowing I had to fit three figures wide across the back seat had already given me a scale about twice that of the basic LEGO® car - a whopping 12 studs across.
My preliminary designs were really, really big. Trying to design a mechanism for spreading wings, retractable landing gear, and a cockpit that can seat five, and still have room for a bulkhead door leading aft....well, it was just monstrous. I was up to 30 studs wide at one point. The cockpit was looking very spacious- and that contradicted the text.
"At the parking lot there was a bobble: which heap, mine of theirs. [Gay] is intended for two but can take four. The rear seats are okay for two for short trips. Theirs was a four-passenger family saloon, not fast but roomy - and their luggage was in it." - page 18
So I had to start over - and design from the cockpit out. I had to cram everything into as tight a space as possible. The final count was 16 studs wide. And that cockpit now looked like the book described - enough room for two comfortably, and a bit of room in the back for passengers.
Now that I knew how wide the ship was going to be, I could start work on the exterior. The basic design - boxy - was easy enough. The nose, however, was giving me fits.
At first, I wanted to put a bit of classic Ford styling into it - headlights, maybe some fins. And then I remembered ChittyChittyBangBang. Perhaps "car like" was not the way to go.
Next, I tried for something that resembled the book covers - a nose vaguely like that of the space shuttle. The end result was a joke. A terrible, terrible joke. The windows were too high off the ground for the descriptions in the text to work. And, well, it just looked sad.
So, since the text didn't have any description to base a design off of, I made my own style choices.
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