Blacktron “Instigator”

Universally condemned as the ugliest and most wretched device to ever fly people to Space - both by its enemies as well as beneficiaries - the Instigator was nevertheless considered uniquely critical for continued success of the most sensitive among the top secret Blacktron intelligence operations.

The Instigator is rumoured to have been designed by a rogue AI in service of a mad ex-Blacktron scientist, banished for major transgressions against the Company. Expelled to a remote asteroid, he discovered a wreck of an old Alienator, and rebuilt it into a twisted machine, solely focused on information gathering and subtle interference. When the Blacktron High Command eventually started noticing some strange patterns in behaviors of their own fleet, and separately a scheme was discovered of Company money seeping through the cracks into weird operations, all the threads eventually led the private investigators to the desolate floating rock. A special ops team was secretely dispatched to bring back under Company control the source of the disruptions. The fate of the scientist is shrouded in mystery, but the spacecraft was reappropriated, and eventually acquired legendary notoriety.

The construction of the Instigator is rickety and fragile. It would never pass even the barest standards of safety or build quality. But Blacktron was not founded on safety. What the Company lives on, is first and foremost - information. And as far as signal gathering and emitting, the Instigator with its dense array of antennas simply has no equals. The core sticking point is the unique, fractal-shaped receiver of its main dish. Despite long years of research, none of the scientists investigating it managed to copy its singularly powerful characteristics without also reproducing the obnoxious rest of the module. The saving grace is the fact, that the Instigator is (barely!) compatible with the new modular system of Blacktron connectors, as used on their flagship Renegade spaceship. Based on what is known, this was a conscious design constraint, intended to allow escaping the asteroid by attaching the machine to any intercepted Company spacecraft. After realizing how much cost was sunk into trying to fix the Instigator, the Blacktron High Command promptly shut down any further funding, disbanded and reassigned the researchers to projects deemed more productive, and swiftly rubber-stamped the original construction into the core fleet. The module has since become the subject both of loathing and pride among generations of Company agents.

The Instigator is my attempt at disassembling the classic 6876 Alienator and building something from it that would be compatible with the new modular system used in the new 10355 Blacktron Renegade from 2025. It is very convoluted and hacky, and fragile in places - but hey, it works!!! If you own the 40580 Blacktron Cruiser GWP set, I really recommend building the amazing, free MOC-211670 Blacktron BX-9 “Buzzard” from Brick_Lizard, a reMOC converting it to a design which is also compatible with the same modular system.

The Instigator has clips both at its front as well as its back. I like to plug it at the rear of the Renegade, in place of one of its “engine” modules. I tend to add the smaller “engine” module from the BX-9 Buzzard MOC at its rear. I can then build a “satellite” from the leftover “engine” module and the “scanner” module, and just stick it on one of the Renegade’s wings.

The Instigator can obviously be also merged with the modules comprising the small “satellite” of the Renegade, making an arguably adorable “space airplane”, convertible into a “manned, self-propelled satellite”.

Finally, it works perfectly fine also as a module of the MOC-211670 Blacktron BX-9 “Buzzard”.

I made the instructions for the Instigator available for free, currently via Rebrickable as MOC-226031. I plan to also put them on this website at some point in the future, but in the meantime, if you want them without signing up to Rebrickable, please message me on Mastodon, and I’ll send them to you.

💬 Discuss. (or, on: rebrickable, r/lego, r/afol, r/blacktron )