It’s always great to see a first-timer in the online fan community introduce themselves with as sweet of a build as Michael Kanemoto has done with his Chrysalis spaceship.

The builder says he spent a few hundred hours over the past couple of months perfecting his design, and I’d say the effort was well worth it. This is a gorgeous and sleek spacecraft featuring all kinds of clever design details. The colors look great and the launch pad has a nice retro look to it. But the coolest touch may be that the builder has also replicated the ship in microscale.

No need for frantic searching to find the nearest fuel station for this LEGO starfighter, that goes by the intimidating name D.I.E Fighter. The builder of this fine ship, Pascal Schmidt, tells us that D.I.E. actually stands for Dual Ion Engine, but I don’t think it comes in peace. Those four blue panels are actually high performance solar panels that provide power, as long as the fighter doesn’t enter any long dark wormholes I assume. With some nice nods to Neo Classic Space with the grey hull and bumblebee stripes, there’s a lot to love about this little fighter. Don’t look too hard for the pilot though, he is hidden inside the opaque, spherical central cockpit.

This starfighter ship was built as an entry to the Real World +200 Starfighter Contest currently running on Flickr until May 15th, 2017. Entries must be a minifigure scale starfighter (with at least one minifig pilot) which could realistically exist in 200 years, assuming no magic warp engines, gravity techno babble or deflector shields. Get building…

I have a thing for space corridors. I can’t explain it, I can’t define it — I just have a thing for space corridors. Turns out, I’m not the only one! Tim Goddard has created an H-shaped corridor section inspired by Jeremy Williams’ Alpha Zero Niner and built as part of a collaboration to be revealed in a couple of months. Tim has captured all the elements of a good space corridor: plenty of details, cool greebling, great depth of field, creative lighting and a Classic Space minifig.

Some spaceships are made for carrying cargo, others for deep space exploration. But there is no doubt that Leonard ZX is a ship designed for the offensive manoeuvres of war. Flavio has designed the starship Leonard ZX with speed and agility at the fore, with a sleek nose leading to a powerful, edgy hull. I love the colour blocking of red and white and the use of tails to give the sharp angles on the outside of the hull.

Just behind the white cockpit area is the ingeniously placed red hockey helmet, proving that health and safety is paramount, even in a war fighting machine.

A lot of the LEGO spaceships we feature here are large capital ships or nimble starfighters. David Roberts brings us an interesting change of pace with a heavy-duty maintenance pod — the sort of workhorse utility vehicle which keeps the solar system running. The striping and the brick-built ID number are excellent, but what caught my eye were the manipulator arms, the thruster design, and the cockpit design. A shout out for the landing skids too — a nice little practical touch in a building genre often obsessed with style over realism.

Black is one of the basic LEGO colors and one of the most common among all types of pieces. But owning a colossal amount of black parts doesn’t mean you’re good at building in black. Timofey Tkachev shows us how one should treat the color by using nearly a hundred various parts available in black. Arches, handlebars, even windows — you name it. Actually, I’m not sure if there is any LEGO piece in this ship that is used ‘regularly’. This is why Timofey’s creations are so captivating to examine.