03/16/2021 – I believe I’ve finalized the weapon bay design. I still need to add details. Pictures below.
Work started by reorganizing the weapons cluster inside the main body. The barrel shaped base was good but didn’t leave enough room for the weapon modules as I had developed them, and concealed a lot of their geometry. I intend to return to the shape in time, but for now I’ve moved to a slightly expanded arrangement – in part to fit the armatures I made yesterday.
The next step was rebuilding the weapon bay’s armored cover – it had always been a rather haphazard, bulbous lump so something a bit more purposeful was a goal.
Here you can see one arrangement of arms, nestled rather close around the top of the gunpods. I rather like this fully compacted arrangement with everything flattened, but it ran into some issues fitting alongside the very tall gunpods.
I did some experiments with moving “shields” attached to the elbows – this was all to fill in that negative space once the bay was opened. This sort of worked, but caused more problems fitting everything together. 
Instead of free floating animated shields, a three-quarters solid cowl was put in place. Additionally the armature was adjusted so instead of resting flat, it was resting with the arm slightly bent to increase the height. This means the mounting braces can be fixed directly to the ceiling of the internal weapons bay and no longer compete with the gunpod for space. There’s very slight clipping for now but that can be fixed with minor adjustments.
And this is the final form for today’s work on the housing. Top view is with the full main body, bottom view has half of it cut away. The four arms are still present (and have enough room to possibly add more or bulk them up further) but there is a large shell with grooves that conceivably are tracks for the covering to move up and down. You can also get a good view of the remodeled gunpod covering, which hopefully will look a lot more purposeful. One thing to do is a bit of finalization on the perimeter of the gunpod shell, it’s had the main body roughly subtracted from it so it fits together but still doesn’t feel like it’s been engineered.