space

Light and Sound Saturn V

Jason

There is no denying the LEGO Ideas NASA Apollo Saturn V (set 21309) is a brilliant model. It’s big, beautiful and incredibly well engineered – much like the real thing, I imagine! Even before I started building it, I knew it would be worthy of some extra attention to detail, to really bring it to life. I decided to wire it up with lights and sound using the PFx Brick, so that I could easily activate the engine lights or play iconic sounds from the Apollo missions while it was on display. You can see the results in the video, or read on for more details and photos.

https://youtu.be/fgVS4lG7Ruo

I even built a small launch/display platform for when it is displayed vertically. Not only does it allow me to see the engine glow, but I feel it also finishes off the model nicely. Clearly, in the real world it never just sat directly on the engines. I think it will be awesome when someone builds a custom mobile launch platform for it, and I may even build one myself someday, but until then, this stand is simple, effective and quite sturdy.

Saturn V Engines 2

Here are building instructions for the stand, if you would like to see how I built mine, or build one for yourself.

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Micro Ghost Millennium Falcon

Jason

Last week, I was in St. Louis for the FIRST Championships, showing off some robots in the LEGO Education booth. Unrelated to the robotics event, they had a table full of white parts, mostly from the Architecture Studio set, for people to build with. It’s a very interesting exercise to build using a single colour. You focus a lot more on the shapes of what you are creating, using texture to add detail instead of colour differences. I definitely wandered over to that table whenever I had a chance. Who can resist a table full of pieces? One model that came out of it was a micro scale Millennium Falcon. It wasn’t very accurate to the ‘real’ thing, as there was a limited selection of parts, but upon returning home I thought I would try to make a more accurate version at the same scale.

Ghost Falcon

Here are building instructions if you’d like to try to build your own. You can just use a regular 1×1 cone for the cockpit if you don’t have the squat cone that I’m using, which isn’t all that common.

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2017: A LEGO Odyssey

Jason

As I was thinking of projects to incorporate the PFx Brick into, one of the first ideas that popped into mind was to create a LEGO version of HAL 9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although it doesn’t exercise anywhere near the full capabilities of the PFx Brick, I felt HAL is such an iconic entity from the realm of classic science fiction that just hearing him speak from a LEGO model would be incredibly cool. I decided to have some fun with the video for it. Instructions for building your own can be found below.

If you are interested in the PFx Brick, be sure to check out the Kickstarter campaign we are currently running. If it is successful, I’ll provide instructions for integrating it into HAL, as well as the configuration I used for the lighting and sound.

https://youtu.be/qF7gChfsPig

The build is pretty straight forward, mostly using basic pieces for the interior. The red and yellow pieces can be swapped with any colour without changing the outward appearance of the model. The instructions include space for the PFx Brick and the XL Speaker behind the speaker grill, as well as some holes to run the wiring. Feel free to build up the entire interior with basic bricks if you’d rather, or fit in your own lighting.

I decided to name the LEGO version “HAL 0937”, for reasons which will be obvious to anyone who spent time writing words on their calculators in school.

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NCS Aries-K

Jason

If you’re not active in the online LEGO community, you may not be familiar with SHIPtember, wherein participants are challenged to build a large spaceship during the month of September. More specifically, the challenge is to build a spaceSHIP (Seriously Huge Investment in Parts) that must be at least 100 LEGO studs long. My friend Michael and I have long wanted to participate in this building challenge, but neither of us has been willing to commit the time and effort to it… until now.

One of the things that dissuaded us from participating in past years is that building a SHIP in a month typically means saying goodbye to all of your free time for that month. Michael suggested we tighten the timeline, turning it into a 24 hour marathon, and join forces with Kristal and Lucie, with the goal of building a SHIP over 200 LEGO studs long.

We started at 9:00 am Saturday morning, with the intention of building for a full 24 hours. Unfortunately, by the wee hours of the next morning it was clear our abilities were becoming severely hampered. Case in point, the core and exterior of the rotating habitat rings (my responsibility) have a bit of an unfinished look to them, and I would have loved to have spent the last few hours fleshing out the details of those areas. It just wasn’t happening though. We decided to call it a wrap after 21.5 hours and here is the result, the NCS Aries-K, serving all your Minifig’s needs on their trips to Mars!

NCS Aries-K Builders

It was a wonderful building experience, with a lot of fun, excitement and collaboration. Would I do it again? Probably not for 24 hours, but the idea of marathon building intrigues me. It really forces you to get to it, without spending hours agonizing over the little details.

If you are interested in seeing more of this ship and how it came together, I put together a couple of videos of the event. Here is one documenting the build session.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LA3NraMPg68

And an overview of the finished ship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_V7v3Cm5dM

If you’d like to see the raw time lapse videos, Michael has posted them on his channel at brick dimensions.

Camera 1 – Camera 2

We broke down the building responsibilities roughly around our various areas of expertise, and this is how it worked out:

Michael – hanger bays, bridge and electrical engineering
Me – habitat rings and mechanical engineering
Kristal – engine and interiors
Lucie – interiors and crew

And here are the final specs of the ship:

– Dimensions – 237 x 90 x 90 studs (over 6 feet long!)
– Rotating habitat arcs powered by 2 Power Functions XL motors, with fully detailed interiors.
– Rotating crew accommodation ring powered by 2 Power Functions M motors.
– Rotating engine core powered by 1 Power Function M motor and illuminated by 3 RGB LED lights
– 2 forward hangar bay decks for receiving small spacecraft.
– 27 blinking navigation lights across the entire ship, including red/green port/starboard markers, white/red fore/aft lights on the arcs and white/red strobe navigation lights.

Red Viper

Jason

I was away traveling for most of the last month, trying to escape the winter.  Unfortunately that also meant I was away from my LEGO collection.  Of course the awesome thing about LEGO is that you don’t really need that much to have fun with it.  I picked up one of the new small creator sets (31032 Red Creatures) to see what I could build with it.  I find these creator sets are a really great value – they have instructions for 3 different models and usually come with a great selection of parts for designing something cool yourself.

I decided to build a space ship and ended up with a cool little Vic Viper style fighter, although after playing with it a bit I decided it could also be used as a utility vehicle.  The front prongs kind of remind me of a fork lift and I can definitely see using them haul around cargo.

Video, photos and building instructions can all be found below.  Enjoy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bs20m_SDd5k

 

WRG Mark V Dragonfly

Jason

A minifig scale LEGO racer.  I originally planned to build a series of these racers at different scales, but this was the only one that I actually finished.

Dragonfly

 

 

Enterprise Update

Jason

A 1:3250 scale LEGO model of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D (Starfleet Galaxy class explorer) , from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

After building my Galor Class Destroyer I decided to revisit my Galaxy Class Explorer and give it a refresh.  The main goal of the update was to make the color scheme uniform, but I ended up tweaking some of the other details as well.

Leonov

Jason

A 1:60 scale LEGO model of the Leonov, from the move 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

This is another one of my favorite science fiction vessels, and was an obvious companion build for the Discovery.  It is built to the same scale as the Discovery, and can technically couple with it. Unfortunately doing so under the influence of Earth’s gravity requires an enormous amount of external support, which I did create at some point. I have an edited photo of them joined, but it’s actually not very interesting.

The armature containing the habitat modules rotates, and is powered by an internal motor and gearing system.

I have created building instructions for it but, much like the Discovery, at 3650 pieces it would be an ambitious project.  Again, keep in mind that it was designed and built in 2004, so some pieces may be harder to come by these days.

Leonov
Leonov
Cockpit
Antennas
Docking Clamp
Docking Clamp
Armature
Habitat Modules
Reactor Fins
Engines