Anyone who grew up on first-person shooters like Doom or Quake should recognize a few things in Steve Marsh AKA Rubblemaker’s LEGO build: the industrialized aesthetic, the glimpse of some otherworldly monster just waiting to be riddled full of bullets, and of course the giant minigun.
Tell the monster to wait a second while you inspect the build a little more.
It’s not every day we get to see a pair of pugilist automatons like in the “RoboDojo” by LEGO builder Rubblemaker. As Light Gray lands a powerful flywheel kick, we can see the sparks shoot out of Dark Gray’s noggin. Each bot looks wonderfully posable, capable of all kinds of bashes and blocks. But my favorite bit has got to be the pair of gold wheels in the back wall. It feels like such an appropriate fusion between martial arts decor and machinery.
If you’re going to be a baddie, you need to look the part. Rubblemaker‘s take on evil spacecraft is an exercise in just that. The colour scheme is a big part of the bad guy brand, and Classic Space villains Blacktron has got that nailed. Stealth black, with pops of yellow and translucent red highlighting all the dangerous bits as a show of strength. But a good livery (bad livery? Good but bad… You know what I mean. Anyway) will fall flat if it’s not used right. Luckily, this Mohawk spacecraft looks positively furious. Pointy wings, big guns at the front, even bigger engines at the back. You don’t even need to do anything particularly nefarious in it, flying this around will have everyone quaking in their moon-boots at the mere sight of it!
Everyone needs to recharge every now and again; especially robots. And builder Rubblemaker has just the thing for a drowsy droid. This marvelous robot req. room comes equipped with plenty of charging devices and even a serving of a delicious Blue Alcobot to take the edge off. And you can’t beat that view!
This new LEGO creation by Rubblemaker is called Symbiosis. If you recall your grade school science classes, symbiosis is where two organisms share a mutually beneficial relationship. I’m not entirely sure if this is mutually beneficial; that poor clod in the cockpit may or may not be this ship’s pilot but it is most definitely its fuel source. If this ship moves as fast as Voyager II, it would take this suffering fool 9.5 years to get to Uranus. Plus you couldn’t even land there because science journals, as well as my grade school self, will tell us that Uranus is a gaseous, smelly giant. It’s likely you’d have to keep going for another few decades to reach a land-able rock and even then it’s no guarantee the locals will be friendly. Space travel sucks!
One of the great things about the podracers in Star Wars is that it’s quite easy to put a creative spin on it. Two massive engines, link it to a cockpit with some flimsy cables, and voila! Having said that, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an Imperial podracer like Rubblemaker‘s here. Using the TIE fighter’s signature ball cockpit as the pod is really clever (and probably safer than the open cockpits some other podracers have). The engines also take some design cues from the Empire’s main starfighter. Like the cockpit it just seems like such a natural design choice, but I’m not sure I would have thought of it!
Chances are you immediately recognize this ship built by Rubblemaker. Odds are equally good you don’t know its name. “EF76 Nebulon-B Escort Frigate” doesn’t stick in the mind like “X-Wing” or “Death Star,” but it has appeared in tons of Star Wars media over the years. It even served as the headquarters of the Rebel Alliance for a time. Rubblemaker’s midi-scale recreation of the ship is a fitting tribute to this often-overlooked piece of sci-fi history. Clocking in at 81cm long, 42cm high, and made from over 2500 pieces, this is actually Rubblemaker’s second attempt at the ship, and possibly the most accurate version ever built.
Beautifully greebled and full of clever angles and elegant slopes, the ship looks amazing photoshopped against the cosmos, but you might want to take in an unedited view to really appreciate all the work that went into the build. Note the in-scale Millennium Falcon docked along the ship’s spine. “Millennium Falcon.” Now that’s a name that stays with you!
When is a big space engine too big? Rubblemaker says there’s no such thing. He’s found an engine that’s bigger than his little space pod, and decided it needs two of them. The power-to-weight ratio of this thing must be off the charts! Despite their almost comical size, they do look great here, with some greebling inside and on the sides suggesting some very complicated internals. I guess if the engine is that big, you might as well fit whatever you can in there. I like the two slopes for the bumblebee stripes on the wings – it’s a bit of a different take on a feature that is a mainstay of Neo-Classic Space creations like this one. Can we call them wings? They do seem a bit small for that..
Modeled after the Trilobate arrowhead, builder Rubblemaker provides a speedy LEGO starfighter made for quick trips across the cosmos. It’s not everyday that you see Bionicle parts interspersed on a space creation, but the builder navigates it well, using the Rahkshi legs to great effect around the cockpit. And the shaping of the rear engine with toothed wheels and gears feels right at home here. But overall, while I understand the ancient inspiration for this build, my mind is instead taken back to 1998 and the Aquazone faction Stingrays. With a high concentration of dark gray, highlights in red, and wing curves reminiscent of a squid’s body, I feel like this fighter would be at home in the stars or the sea.
LEGO’s iconic Classic Space style has been reinterpreted in many forms over the years, typically rounded up in what fans call Neo-Classic Space (NCS) and we’ve seen everything from spaceships to tanks wearing that beloved blue, grey, and transparent-yellow color scheme. But there’s always room for breaking the mold a bit more while still adhering to the basic style. Enter Rubblemaker and the Manta Ray, an NCS vessel that can go places no Classic Spaceship has gone before: underwater! Bearing a strikingly unique shape and just the perfect amount of greebles, this cool design now has me wanting to do a crossover mashup with Aquazone.
Of course, it can’t really be Classic “Space” unless there’s some space involved, and the Manta Ray is only too happy to oblige, as it’s versatile enough to traverse the cold depths of outer space as easily as the ocean.
A LEGO builder who goes by the name of Rubblemaker has built a Queen Bee Royal Viper Drone. Let me break that down for you. Queen. Bee. Royal. Viper. Drone. What part of that don’t you understand? Clearly, she’s out to do some badass queen bee stuff like infiltrating the hives of other bees and stealing their plans for honey, pollination, and other bee-related stuff. But no need to explain it any further. You had me at Queen Bee! Check out why we think Rubblemaker is the bee’s knees.
One of the things I miss most now that I live in California is thunderstorms. Sure, we occasionally get a bit of rain. But it’s rare that that lightning flashes or the windows rattle from the vibrations of a thunderclap. And I always used to find that so soothing. So, if I had a chance to take to the skies in the ThunderGlide by builder Rubblemaker, I might never come down again. This craft channels the atmosphere’s own electrical power through its lightning rod to stay aloft as long as a storm is raging. Which is pretty rock and roll, when you think about it. What’s more, the use of ample pentagonal tiles on the wings and the tubing on either side of the cockpit call to mind the keys and pipes of an organ. Imagine flying through the rain in this bad boy with a little Iron Butterfly playing. Yeah, that’s the life for me…
