It’s hard enough to live in space, thanks to cosmic radiation and lack of atmosphere. Why make things even tougher by leaving toxic waste laying around? Horcik Designs has a new vehicle called the HMT4 to handle all your hazardous material handling needs. It has treads aplenty to handle the roughest terrain, and it is adorned in the colors of Neo-Classic Space. The impressive density of details is only enhanced by some carefully chosen custom stickers. So cool!
We see a lot of original spaceship designs from the LEGO community, and a lot of LEGO pieces being used in clever new ways. But I’m still always impressed by those builders who boldly integrate unusual pieces and pull it off with panache. One such builder is Curtis Collins with the Seraph. It’s a gorgeous design that uses bright red LEGO canoes for the engine cowlings, despite a plethora of black greebling on the struts—and miraculously, it works. Keen-eyed readers will also spot that the cockpit glass is a LEGO Christmas ornament.
This dangerous looking spaceship is filled with clever techniques and interesting parts. The extensive use of Technic gear racks is especially menacing, but the real standout here is the innovative sticker usage. They weren’t custom printed. Rather, Adrian chopped up a bunch of the yellow stickers from set 75053 The Ghost (from Star Wars Rebels) and placed them on the model in an interesting pattern. The stickers were already printed to be scruffy-looking, but the builder wanted them to be even scruffier. So he abraded the stickers by rubbing the model back and forth on a wooden table. The stickers aren’t shiny and smooth any more, but the result is definitely worth it.
Great creations are those that are able to stirs emotions — joy, amazement, compassion or even uneasiness. Somehow Sheo. has developed such an unusual building style, that almost each of his works looks a little bit disturbing to me — of course, in the best sense of the word.
When you hear the word “starfighter” you prepare yourself to see an awesome cockpit, some huge engines and a couple of powerful laser guns. But not this time. I can distinguish engines on the back and at least a dozen of gun barrels on the front, but the overall appearance gives me shivers as I can’t tell what these silver wings or round golden tiles are for…it’s convincingly alien. And don’t even tell me there will be Mark III!
The LEGO Ideas team has announced the winners of the third 2015 LEGO Ideas Review. Nine sets were up for consideration, and two were selected. These projects will now proceed through a design phase, where LEGO designers will tweak the designs. They will then become available as official LEGO sets.
UPDATE: 21306 LEGO Beatles Yellow Submarine is out now!
The Beatles Yellow Submarine by Kevin Szeto
Apollo 11 Saturn V by saabfan and whatsuptoday
We’ll update you on official pictures and pricing once those become available.
The next round are currently in review, and we expect to hear on those in Fall 2016!
NASA Engineer and LEGO fan Nicholas Mastramico has brought us a most excellent follow up to the shuttle, launch pad, and SLS rocket we featured last week. Nicholas’s microscale version is eye-catching with the great detail he’s packed into such a small model. What makes his version particularly special is his relationship with the rocket: Nicholas is a structural design engineer for NASA, and is currently working on the real SLS rocket.
This means his micro-SLS has a unique opportunity to stand in the shadows of its ancestors, like the Saturn V rocket pictured here.
Nicholas says he’s always been a huge sci-fi fan – but it was the early pictures of Mars from Sojourner that truly hooked him on space travel. He decided then he would build rockets for NASA one day, and that goal guided him through school to where he is now. He was recently involved in a test with a weather balloon, for which he provided a passenger. The experiment took the minifig up to 120,000 feet!
There are more shots of some of the features of the mobile launch platform and payload capsules, as well as an itty-bitty adorable crawler!
Michał Kaźmierczak has built a stunning spaceship — the Spectre. Whilst the model is decked out in Classic Space blue and gray, it’s anything but a retro throwback, making use of new parts and modern building techniques to deliver a creation so packed full of detail it’s a delight to zoom in on the photo and look around. Kudos for the opening hatches and the packed interior — excellent stuff.
And if the model itself isn’t cool enough for you, Michał has used his photo-editing skills to fantastic effect on this hero-shot of the Spectre touching down on an asteroid. Cracking photography and editing show off the ship in all its glory. I’m getting a total Chris Foss vibe off this picture, and that’s about the highest praise I can offer on a creation like this. Beautiful.
The asymmetrical ships and bold colors of Homeworld continue to inspire LEGO builders year after year, and Tim Schwalfenberg is no exception. Tim is working on another large fleet for BrickWorld Chicago in a couple of weeks, but teased us with this Corvette from the Vaygr faction (duplicated on a cool deep space backdrop). While I certainly love seeing (and building) large fleets of microscale spaceships, it’s often easy to overlook the great building techniques that go into the smaller vessels, overshadowed as they often are by the large capital ship at the center of the fleet. Despite their relatively small size, the Corvette is packed full of detail, from the greebly sensors to the cannon.
Tim says he included a number of custom pieces that he 3D-printed himself. Can you spot them? What do you think about 3D printing pieces to include in LEGO creations?
Otto Blees built a follow-up to his LRV3 Javelin with Birth of History, another Guardian jumpship from Destiny. His LEGO rendition of this chunky craft looks fantastic and accurate to the in-game ship, but with a more vibrant color scheme. The subtle angles on the fuselage and detailing inside and outside of the massive thrusters are the standout features to me here.
Space mechs are always a sight to behold. I mean, what is the purpose of legs in space? You know what their purpose is? To look cool—and the MA-01C Powered Seraphim I by Caleb proves it.
This build certainly catches your eye with its incredible silhouette and the bold use of orange as highlights for the armor. The spacemen backing it up just serve to show a proper scale, especially considering it fits a minifig inside. It also comes in a flight-ready version sans armor plating.
Now it looks like it can cause some deep space damage.
A pillar of the classic LEGO Space community, Mark Neumann has emerged from myth and legend to bring us Universal Explorer LL2016. This 11-foot-6-inch behemoth of a ship is complete with giant guns, a science module, a motorized ring, interior lights, a huge cargo bay big enough to fit most official LEGO sets, and over a dozen smaller vehicles stored on board. We’ve sat down with Mark to learn a bit more about this incredible creation and Mark’s journey to build it.
Click to read our interview with Mark!
Space is pretty fantastic. Right now, we space fans have a lot to be excited about with SpaceX’s reusable, landing first stage rocket; Blue Origin’s reusable, landing rocket for space tourism; and the recent achievement on the International Space Station with Bigelow Aerospace’s Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, an experimental expandable space station module.
Lia Chan gives a glorious look into the past at Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A. This beautiful, beautiful build features the launch platform, crawler transport system, and NASA’s retired workhorse, Space Shuttle Atlantis.
