And finally, the image-heavy DOUBLESHIFT:
(There was an artsy image floating around somewhere of the amphiptere mode, but I can't find it now.)
Anyway... This was a design I've been fiddling with for a little over twenty years, mostly doing the engineering in my head. Essentially, a 12-changer which would actually work as a plastic toy. I started with the truck and insect modes, and every so often my brain would poke me with an idea for another way all the parts could flip around. It is a very slight partsformer in that the shotgun accessory becomes the conning tower in the hydrofoil mode and the middle third of the dinosaur head. The purple wings of the jet mode also come off and reattach elsewhere for the amphiptere mode. And the coloration is still very much up for being redone; I used the white-blue-orange combination for the prototype as it's fairly easy on the eyes and a lot of plastic prototypes tend to be cast in white plastic first. Then there's deciding on texturing and greeblies, and what sorts of things work with different modes...
For reference, the modes are:
- Robot (not shown here, as it's one of the ones I'm still tweaking): Still extremely blocky and undetailed. I'm trying to figure out some ways to break up the lines and maybe give it some torso articulation, or at least a waist swivel. Also some better feet than the G1-esque "wedges on the front of the shins and no actual separate feet" design.
- Puma mode (above, with the light yellow background): still figuring out whether I can incorporate a tail in some way. And _maybe_ better paws, although there's really not a lot of spare transformation space left in the forelimbs.
- Jet mode: surprisingly large compared to the crunched-down vehicle modes. Still working on what I should do for landing gear. I have designed side-mounted air intakes, but they're not in this older render.
- Insect/construction-drone mode: I actually fairly like this one. The head swivels from side to side, and the antennae each have a hinge joint in halfway up their length. Plus there's the leg articulation.
- Truck mode: Sports an AA battery (er... anti-aircraft, not electrical) on the back. It's not easy to see from these images, but the orange pad has a pair of giant-size red Autobot sigils on it.
- Two-headed
amphiptere mode: Basically a fancy name for a legless wyvern or dragon. It has twin tailspikes, the AA cannons are hip-mounted, and the wings have multiple points of articulation, as do the necks. Inspirations include G1 Hun-grrr.
- Hydrofoil mode (or submarine, if you like): One of the "featureless block" modes. Has the conning tower on one side with the fold-out radar bits or viewing decks or whatever you prefer. The orange slab makes for a good helipad.
- Helicopter mode: Not complete here - the tail is going to have the same wedges on the end as the amphiptere tail. Design mostly thanks to Lunatron, who completely revamped my earliest attempt, which looked more like one of those spindly cargo-lifters.
- Dinosaur or raptor mode: I still need to add little flip-out forearms. Fairly good neck. hip, ankle, and tail articulation, although the knee and ankle are kind of frozen here. They can bend; they just can't hold any kind of weight when doing so. Something to work on perhaps. Plus the head can only look up and down, not to the side, so far.
- Gun mode: I don't like it that much: too blocky and it has more kibble than I'd like. Might replace it with a cannon-emplacement mode or something. It's mostly just because pretty much every multichanger prior to 2000 had a space-gun mode.
- Tank mode: Well, technically more like a self-propelled assault gun; it doesn't have a rotating turret. The red bits on the side are fold-down tank treads, vaguely similar to G1 Quickswitch except they don't lift the chassis very far off the ground.
- Train mode: Another fairly blah mode. Mostly made to see how skinny I could get the toy if I folded everything in from the sides. Still needs wheels.
The last image is some thoughts on designs for the forearm and hand (plus wrist-mounted welding spike) for the robot mode, and how an articulated hand could fold away. Because it's attracted questions before, I'll note that the double layer of opening panels is because the outer layer unfolds to become the tank treads, and the inner layer actually flips out separately to become the sides of the dinosaur head. There's a fair number of transformation joints packed into that space. Also I find it hilarious that the thumb, of all things, becomes part of the external paneling, although none of the other fingers or the palm do.
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Edit: Ah-HA! I found the missing images on an old online archive!
The second image is just more angles on the boat/sub/aircraft-carrier mode, but it's the top one I've been looking for for a couple of years. Yes, the amphiptere mode looks janky as hell because I wasn't tracing it from an actual 3D model, just guessing how it might look. The truck mode _was_ screenshotted from Sketchup, but then cleaned up a lot in a 2D program to make it not look like a mess of lines.
And finally, here's the oldest image I had of the original idea, which I thought I'd lost - a 3D prototype from nearly seventeen years ago:
As you can see, it really was just tossing basic poly shapes together to rough out the idea.