Tetrajet (Cybertronian) Hooligan

Occasionally in the G1 cartoon, you'd see pyramid-shaped Decepticon jets, which still turned into roughly the same robot mode as the F-15s. I realized you could sort of kitbash a Hooligan Cyberjet into this sort of mode pretty easily, by just enclosing it in a tetrahedral shell. Sure, it wouldn't quite match the "real" tetrajets, which were more curved, the points pointier. But it'd be a close approximation.

To start with, I cut out various paper triangles and folded them into tetrahedra to see what size I'd need. It turned out that Hooligan could scrunch up inside a tetrahedron with edges 4.5" (11.5 cm) long. Any smaller and the pyramid wouldn't close. Any larger, and it'd be too big. As it turns out, even 4.5" sides make for a somewhat bulky wingpack.

After cutting out four triangles of the right size from plastic sheeting, I cast about for some sort of hinge, settling on some Lego pieces. I removed the back wing unit from Hooligan and attached it to the middle triangle, using putty to fill in the gaps and secure the hinges better. Finally, I attached three Lego "dish" pieces to the back of the middle triangle to act as thrusters.

Then it was just a matter of painting it all in orange and black acrylic enamels, with some copper and silver accents. My orange paint was a bit darker than Hooligan's orange, but it goes well with him anyway. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the plastic sheeting I used, the paint left bubbles that I couldn't get rid of using my normal anti-bubble tactics, so the paint job is a bit pockmarked. Sigh.

If I had room to put in more equipment and tools, I might have tried to use thicker plastic and sunk the hinges into the plastic itself, so that things would fold flush instead of leaving 2-3 millimeter gaps. And I'd also install a missile rack inside the bottom triangle (the one behind his legs in robot mode), since you can't close the thing completely if the launcher is loaded. It could also be set up so that if you dropped the bottom panel down a bit, the missiles would be ready to launch.

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