I was thinking of your predicament in the wee hours of the morning, and I suddenly had the idea to draw this. I hope the geometry between the two forms are recognizable enough so you can kinda tell how this thing transforms. There's a lot of twisting/rotation involved.
The four wings become its arms and legs, with pretty much full articulation. They're pretty thin and weak though. Instead of pinky fingers, it has those fins that project blades. All the main thrusters swivel around and point backward like tail and wing binders.
As for weapons I recommended internal ones, so the main gun swivels around as an over the shoulder cannon, and it also has a beam cannon in its torso. It uses bits/remote weapons because it can't use handheld weapons very well. I would have loved to give it a machinegun (because you would personally know how much of a nutcase I can be with those) but I couldn't figure a smooth way to pull it off. So yeah, that pretty much embodies the ideas I had. Maybe this might help you out a bit.
(Sorry if you don't like it though. It was sort of a rush job that only took about a day.)
Oh, and here is the prototype! =o
The resolution on dA is very small. I managed to dig up the full-sized one from your new homepage, and it looks pretty good. I agree with Crash that the expressions are amusing. And yeah, the perspective could use a bit of a shift. (Blah, I hate drawing backgrounds.) They all have really big guns! =xVR7 wrote:Website thingy.
On the other hand I feel kind of bad that in the end I only used like a ninth of that for my actual banner image.
That's an interesting looking facility. Just where are they?
By the way, that's 9 pages and 20K+ views for ya. =p