09-05-01
Vehicle Development:
Dragonfly Chopper

Step#1

In this case, the obsession driving this vehicles development was Noel's. He has been fascinated by dragonflies since he was a kid. When he would go on fishing trips with his Dad, he would always pick places to cast based on where the dragonflies hovered. Then he would sit sit in the fishing stillness, while the dragonflies hovered around him, sometimes using his shoulders for landing pads.

So suing the idea of a Dragonfly as a basis for a helicopter seemed like a natural.

The dragonfly chopper is supposed to have one guy -- sometimes two -- in it, laying down in the forward pod, the "head". To some degreee, you could think of the dragonfly as a motorcycle of the air in Menda City, though the vehicle is currently only operated by megacorporations.

For those of you who are amused by this kind of thing, the original wireframe for the dragonfly chopper was built using Bryce, since Noel isn't really trained in any other 3D modeling tool. So he added together shapes until he had a look he liked.

The image to the right is the vector art version of the dragonfly chopper at night, taking off from its landing pad. In the animation clip, you can see the propulsion source light off for a second as the chopper rises.

The Drasgonfly power source is something we aren't going to discuss right now. But while we may happily ignore issues of aerodynamics in favor of a cool look, the idea of propulsion and power is one of the central concepts being fought over in Menda City.