With the original renders up top, one thing I noticed was the absence of what would be the entry hatch in Battloid mode -- when the head tips forward for the pilot to get in and out of the cockpit. Was that taken into consideration? Also, for all the lovely, detailed concept and engineering art, I have never seen anything that shows how the cockpit reconfigures between the vertical and horizontal modes. How is the pilot's seat gimballed, and in a way that still allows for ejection? Where do the various displays and screens come from?
I, too, have been eager to see you continue on this, but knew your Darth Real Life considerations and didn't want to be pushy.
That is a fantastic question. Plenty of consideration went into it, and many attempts were made to try to work out both the battroid cockpit reconfiguration and battroid pilot egress. I eventually came to the conclusion that it is all just too much "anime magic", and won't work without significant compromise to the design.
Case in point, the "VF-1 Master File" books from about 10 years ago worked out mechanical schemes to make it work, and they had to do some pretty weird and unorthodox stuff to create the spaces required. They had to do things like have the entire nose gear bay rotate on a hinge at the front to pivot out of the way. Due to the curvature of the bottom on the nose section, there actually is a space between the nose and the wings in battroid to allow for this (if the gear bay doors remain attached to the pivoting bay), but the concept is not structurally sound at all.
For the DYRL design, the target for the battroid egress would be this drawing:
When discussing this on another forum some years ago, here was an image I used of my model, in wireframe, illustrating part of the problem:
You can see 2 copies of the seat (which does support the battroid headrest configuration) in light blue, the nose gear bay portion that gets in the way in green, and the head cavity (where the egress hatch would have to be located) in red. The seat would have to go through a really tight S-curved path to get from one position and orientation to the other. Also, the flat area in the cavity, where the hatch would have to be, is large enough for the seat itself to shoehorn through, but hardly so with a pilot strapped in. Also, the "box" behind the seat (cockpit tub in darker blue) would have to somehow get out of the way.
That box behind the seat getting out of the way should be part of the battroid cockpit reconfiguration, and that is a big part of the challenge with that reconfiguration. The DYRL cockpit is completely redesigned from what was shown in the original TV series to try to do a better job of it, but there is still some big "anime magic" that would have to happen. The screens that come out and surround the pilot in battroid in the DYRL design must all come from this box somehow (though none of the drawn details seem to correspond between the two configurations), and it would have to do so in a way that left the required space for the seat to pass through for egress.
While it wouldn't be too hard to come up with a design where the top, front, and sides of that box break apart to become these screens (with the screens on the inside of the box in fighter mode), the exterior portions of that box would hve to have these shapes and details, rather than the design that remains consistent on all the DYRL fighter cockpit art.
The TV series cockpit solves this all by having the entire rear interior of the nose section be a huge empty cavity, which I never liked at all:
Not only would it require that the entire rear section of the nose be a hollow shell, but it also seems to require that additional space behind the nose (into the after fuselage section that becomes the back of the battroid) in order to have the required space, and especially to allow for the straight rails that the seats would travel upwards for the egress, as seen here on the 2-seater VF-1D in the original TV show:
Obviously, that rail would be completely outside of the nose section, yet somehow attaches to the seats that came from inside the nose.
So, since I wanted to replicate as much of the wonderful and consistent detail from the fighter-mode original artwork, I decided to stick with that rather than make up a bunch of contrived mechanisms that would require altering the design substantially to make it all work.
My head cavity in the back of the nose section was based primarily on this image (sans the VF-1D head attachment, which has problems of its own):
It would be a total fantasy to even put together a design that would mechanically work, if not accurate to the original artwork, and making it in a way that could be physically articulated in a scale model would be a tremendous challenge. If anything, my more realistic fantasies were simply to model up the static battroid cockpit as an option, matching all that original artwork, but without trying to make it actually mechanically reconfigure magically into an accurate fighter-mode cockpit.
At any rate, nice job getting me to dig out my old files and start looking at this again, on one of the rare days that I actually have some spare hours to have some fun!
