Tag Archives: Tim Goddard

You have 20 nanoseconds to comply

When these cops come to kick your door in, they don’t mess around. Armed to the teeth and itching for a fight, the squad’s tactical mech carries a faint whiff of ED-209 from Robocop. However, Tim Goddard‘s model is a throwback to an altogether different slice of retro cop sci-fi–LEGO’s Space Police theme of 1989. There’s a tonne of lovely mechanical detailing in amongst the black, and the blue panels and red cockpit give the model some striking standout. I love the guns and missile launcher this thing is carrying, but the smaller arms hanging beneath the cockpit are the killer detail, lending the model some goofy character along with its more obvious menace.

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Dive deep with the return of Aquazone

LEGO fan Tim Goddard is perhaps best known for his space-themed builds, such as this microscale space station we shared in February. Building off of his intergalactic experience, Tim is now diving below the seas to revisit the classic mid-1990s Aquazone theme. The centerpiece here is a large submersible, cleverly designed to look like a lobster. Instead of building the sub in lobster red, Tim went with the iconic yellow, black, and neon orange livery of the Aquanauts. By combining a mix of period-correct parts and more modern elements, Tim has created a submarine that feels both modern and true to the original source material. Meanwhile, an adorable fishy “drone” makes for a fine finishing touch.

Circling the wheel in space

If like me you’ve been following Tim Goddard’s Instagram feed, you’ll have seen him teasing a fleet of colourful microscale LEGO spaceships over the past few weeks. Well the big reveal is finally here: I give you the Perhelion Point space station and attendant spacecraft. Constructed as a series of scaled disks that rotate around a central core, it looks wonderful hanging atmospherically in orbit.

Up close you’ll find some neat building techniques, like the modified plates with pin holes, which are matched with turntable disks to form the station’s super-structure. Naturally, there are multiple landing ports and shuttles to liven things up too. Continue reading →

Mini LEGO Fireball racer from Star Wars: Resistance

If the Disney animated series Star Wars: Rebels was any indication, LEGO fans can look forward to a full assortment of sets featuring the characters and vehicles from the new series, Star Wars: Resistance, which just debuted a couple weeks ago. While we wait for official sets, we can enjoy this lovely mini version of the Fireball, a racing ship maintained by Kaz Xiono, Tam Ryvora, and their teammates, built in brick by Tim Goddard. Tim captures the unique color schemes and markings wonderfully, including the little fins and vanes on the nose and wingtips, and even the small gray panel in the white stripe near the nose.

Next up, Torra Doza’s Blue Ace in iconic Gulf Oil livery?

The Empire marches on

When The Empire Strikes Back first premiered in 1980, Star Wars fans of every age had their collective minds blown when the AT-AT first marched across the snowy battlefield of Hoth. Since that day, the AT-AT has surely become one of the most referenced vehicles in Star Wars, with the possible exception of the Millenium Falcon. Tim Goddard has put together a LEGO creation intended to show the AT-AT in relation to the new AT-M6 featured in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and in doing so, has achieved a highly detailed, accurate depiction that stands out very nicely. I especially like the use of tiles of many sizes to achieve a paneled look, including a few headlight bricks to pop some tiles out.

Looking at the underside and leg assembly shows a particular attention to detail and captures the complicated mechanical nature of this unique vehicle.

Check out these other awesome LEGO AT-ATs previously featured on The Brothers Brick:

It takes a spacecraft of titanic proportions to explore the Ice Titan

There is something special about LEGO’s retro space themes that makes people revisit them time and time again, and it’s probably nostalgia. One of the more popular themes is surely Ice Planet 2002 with its iconic blue-white-black and translucent orange colour scheme, and Tim Goddard has built an excellent microscale spaceship based on the 6973 Deep Freeze Defender, which he’s named Zycon V. It’s also tied closely to a collaborative story recently featured on The Brothers Brick: LEGO Space: ICE Titan.

The spaceship itself has nice shapes and a good balance of details and clean surfaces, as well as following the original’s colour scheme. Though I would have loved to see a bit more translucent orange included, and the curves may not fit into a 90’s inspired creation very well, those are minor points on an otherwise amazing build.

LEGO Space: ICE Titan – exclusive free download and interview

The Brothers Brick enjoyed LEGO Space: Building The Future — the book of wonderful sci-fi creations from rockstar Space builders Tim Goddard and Peter Reid. When the guys got in touch to say they’d penned and illustrated a new tale set in the LEGO Space universe, we got very excited. Even more so when they asked if we’d like to host the tale as exclusive downloadable content for our readers.

Click here to download a free PDF copy of LEGO Space: ICE Titan.

We picked up with the guys to find out more about the creation of this new chapter in the LEGO Space saga…

Click to read our interview with some of the creative team

Mid-scale LEGO U-wing & Blue Squadron X-wing from Rogue One

The UT-60D U-wing gunship revealed in Rogue One (out digitally today and on disc next Tuesday) has inspired numerous LEGO models, from the official 75155 U-wing Fighter set to fan-made creations like the UCS U-wing by Mirko Soppelsa. Adding to his fleet of smaller-scale LEGO Star Wars vehicles, Tim Goddard has built a fantastically detailed U-wing, accompanied by a pair of updated X-wings representing Blue Squadron and Red Squadron.

Like the short-lived 7778 Midi-Scale Millennium Falcon, this scale gives Tim enough pieces to achieve lots of interesting detail (I love the gray section and those blue stripes on the sides of the U-wing) without a huge investment in parts. Naturally, Tim has built fully functional swing-wings for his U-wing.

Target acquired, awaiting instructions

Sci-fi master builder Tim Goddard‘s latest LEGO creation is a mean-looking mech with a cyclopean face. I can just imagine the noise that black iris makes — contracting into merciless focus when this bad boy spots his prey. The tan color scheme feels unusual for a mech — in my head this stuff is nearly always gray (apologies to colorful mech-builders out there). The black greebling is excellent, and the blue stripes and white highlights add a touch of glamour.

As well as the big four-legged critter, Tim has put together a range of mechanical drones in this livery. I’m a fan of this bipedal variant. Check out those toes! It took me a while to figure out the use of hot dog sausages to get the toe angles just right.

Going where no lime wedge has gone before

British builder Tim Goddard (aka Rogue Bantha) is well-known for building Space-themed creations, and his newest build is an eye-catching lime spaceship. The ‘classic space’ colours of grey, blue and transparent yellow have been shunned to create this sublime spaceship. This is another of Tim’s own explorations to broaden his use of colour within the Space theme; we previously blogged his white, tan and azure microscale spacecraft.

Tim’s curved ship is beautifully shaped and vaguely reminiscent of a lime wedge in my mind. There are some lovely little details including discrete use of official LEGO stickers. I am definitely a fan of Tim’s ‘greebles’, whose positioning suggests a hugely complex spaceship by showing a ‘teaser’ surface view. The ship’s hull is suitably futuristic with just the right amounts of lime balanced by white and light blueish grey.

The somewhat garish lime colouring and abundance of probes suggests this is more of a scientific exploration vessel, unless it has a cloaking mechanism…

Building prehistoric creatures with Bright Bricks

Building with LEGO professionally may sound like a dream job to many of us. Recently, whilst I was in the UK for Brighton Modelworld I caught up with Ed Diment (Lego Monster), who gave up his job as a management consultant more than two years ago to partner up with Duncan Titchmarsh, who is the UK’s sole Lego Certified Professional. Together they run Bright Bricks.

We talked about being a professional LEGO-builder and discussed their latest event. From the 26th of February to the 27th of April, the Milestones Museum in Basingstoke (UK) hosts the Lost World Zoo. Bright Bricks and various members of the UK’s LEGO community that were drawn in for this, built dozens of models of prehistoric creatures and plants, that are now on display in the museum. They were finishing the models for this during my visit and I lent a hand working on a 4 meter tall model of a Moa, which is an extinct New Zealand walking bird. They also built a massive sabre tooth tiger, which I photographed in the company workshop.

Two more smaller examples are the ammonite by Tim Goddard (Rogue Bantha and a sabre toothed squirrel, built by Joe Perez (Mortalswordsman).

Visitors to the museum can also take part in activities, such as building a life-size woolly mammoth out of LEGO bricks. Yes, you did read that right: life-size. These guys like to do things big.

The company has been steadily growing. It currently employs about a dozen people working full-time, as well as several more on a temporary basis. The growth has meant having to move several times, because space in the workshop kept running out. They’re now based in a large unit on an industrial estate in Hampshire. Even though this is probably larger than all their previous workshops combined, the number of people, the large builds and the vast numbers of parts that they have in stock means that it can still be pretty difficult to move around in. The growth has also come with an increased amount of red tape. For instance, UK law requires a company of a given size to have an environmental policy and a health and safety policy, that includes having to find out how much heat is produced by a vast quantity of LEGO going up in flames. Ed probably spends more time on this and on dealing with clients and the media than he does on building. He still builds a lot, though, and with a seemingly endless supply of bricks. According to Ed, his current job is not as much fun as building AFOL models all day, but it is still definitely more fun than a regular job. Having spent a day putting more bricks together than I normally do in about a month, I can believe him (although I was still happy to go back to my day job).

If you’re in the South of the UK, I highly recommend that go check out the Lost World Zoo.

Construction SHIPs for your Mega City

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wondered how you would go about building colossal sci-fi mega cities, or mega worlds like Coruscant or Trantor ? According to Tim Goddard(Rogue Bantha) to build a Mega City, you need his Red Titan:

I’m not sure exactly how the magnets are used for construction, or if that’s a wreaking ball attachment, but if they can build such a stylish SHIP like that, they can build my city any day.

Ok Tim, where do I sign up?