My set came!

I actually bit the bullet and went ahead and ordered my Design by Me 'Space Patrol' set.

It's the long ship with big guns on either side and on top, that you find my looking in the gallery for 'space patrol'.

I spent a long time checking and re-checking that it should produce a solid useable model, and I was making fine corrections up until the day I ordered it. 

530 pieces!  It's a big set, it cost me nearly £100, but I'm really, really pleased with it.  The quality of printing on the box is fantastic and looks better than you can appreciate from the design screen.

It actually only just fit into the box, so unless they do bigger boxes I would consider restricting sets to at least less than 700 pieces or they might have to ship it in two boxes. 

The pieces also come in one huge bag with a picking list.  So it's harder to build than a normal set, you have to spend some time sorting out the pieces. 

I had a great time building it, with my 4 year old daughter (She loves space ships) and the finished model was fantastic, my 11 year old nephew says HE wants to order it too!

What I might do - is get my nephew my smaller less expensive set for christmas.  The one I am documenting the build of here.

Overall, I am reallly pleased with the service, and the quality of the set.  I would say though - if you are ordering, spend lots of time checking and re-checking the set by going through the building instructions online and making sure it will fit together and form a solid model.  If you don't - you could end up with an expensive lego set that falls apart in your hands!

Thankfully, I hadn't made any errors and it formed a really solid, functional set - the only weak point being the guns falling off at the slightest knock, but I kind of expected that so...

A few more pictures of the smaller model that I might order my nephew for Christmas:-

Set on order!

Well, I finally finished the Space Pirates Lego Set I've been designing.  The problem is, the finished product comprised of the 2 man raider craft I'm showing at the moment on this blog, a base and a large capital ship with an interior and a 4 man crew...

Total price?  £200 more than I'm happy to spend on a toy at the moment :P

I decided to go with the one I created first, the capital ship, it's in some respects the most interesting model and it's my first attempt so it seems a good place to start.  I went over the design meticulously trying to make sure everything interlocks properly and that it will be a good solid model with some play value once it's finished.

Of course whether I've done this properly will only tell once I get the thing and start building it.  Which takes a while as they have to print the box and instructions to your design... Then hand pick all the bricks and pieces, in my model there are over 500 pieces so...

In the meantime I'm trying to stray away from designing more - I've been watching the my gaps in the Harry Potter series (Goblet of Fire and Phoenix Order) and spending more time on the star wars roleplaying board which is fun...

For now I'll leave you with a couple more images of the 2 man raider craft nearing completion.

What building to Minifigure scale means.

I did have an ambitious thought as to whether I could build an Imperial Star Destroyer to minifigure scale - only a fleeting thought though, because once you start working it out - it becomes a daunting task.

Firstly, an ISD is 1.7 km long, if a 2 metre person is represented by a 2 cm minifigure then that's a 1:100 scale.  So were talking of 1700 metres, or 170,000 cm knocking two noughts off makes it 1700 cm or 17 Metres.


So even if detailed plans of what the Imperial Star Destroyer interior was like existed, you would be aiming to build a lego set nearly 20 metres long, and it's probably half that wide at the widest point.  To test the costing of such a large model I built a layered twin wing section last night in Design by me.  I grouped and duplicated it until I had about 45 cm of wings - the price £50 Now you would need an upper and a lower for this so for the wings outer edges, you have to think £200 per metre.  So for the basic outer shell, super structure we would be talking about spending in excess of £4000 with no interior, command bridge, hangar, fighter craft or crew or even exerior detail.I can imagine the cost would actually run up to in excess of £40,000 minifigures alone would be a problem.  Including the pilots and Stormtroopers an ISD had over 45,000 staff on board.  Considering buying used Starwars Lego figures is the only way to get the correct crew at the moment without buying sets, assuming you used that method to crew the entire crew at what seems to be the going rate of about £5 you would spend £225,000 on crew alone... Assuming there were enough used Stormies and Imperial Officers to crew it in existance and avaialable to buy.

What would be nice was a collaboration between Lucas and Lego and a full minifigure scale Lego Star Wars Theme park, with minifigure scale ISD's, Super Star Destoyers and  a Death Star (Officially the first one was 160 km diameter so that's 16,000,000 cm diameter so minifigure scale makes it 160,000 cm or 1600 M - 1.6 km making the volume about 2,144,660,584 cubic metres....) Of course the second Death Star was supposedly 900 M diameter so that makes it 90,000,000 cm diamter, minifigure scale 9 km diameter... Volume... Oh forget it... You get the idea!

Minifigure scale large Lego Star Wars ships are basically impractical to the point of being ridiculous.

As for my set - the second engine in place, the flat bit will be where the pilots sit.

It's funny I'm considering getting into Lego as an adult, as a hobby.  For a long time all my spare time was thrown at Taekwondo I even made a taekwondo website to help people with patterns.  I ought to start training again.  Lego is fun but it doesn't get you fit!