Product Idea |

A Galaxy At War

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A Galaxy, consumed by war.

The normally peaceful Blue Armada, becoming more miliataristic to defend against the ever encroaching tide of war.

The Red Warrior Empire, proud and combatitive, but reduced to a shadow of its former self. Now with the only option of fighting for honour and territorial expansion.

And the vile, voracious Green Insectorz. A hive of all-consuming insectoid beings waging war to eat and destroy everything in their path.

The idea for this project came to me in a dream. I'd spent the evening designing and when I woke up, I had this vision of a LEGO galaxy swarming with spaceships in my head. So I built it.

It's a step outside of my comfort zone of minifigure-scale vehicles and playsets, but I wanted to challenge myself with something new as I built this essentially still-life design.

Image Captions (#1 is image 1, #2 is image 2, etc):

  1. The whole galaxy, covered in battles on its eight spiral arms.
  2. A lone Warrior Starship, on a routine patrol mission, suddenly ambushed by three nimble Armada fighters, attacking it from all vectors.
  3. The Insectorz launching an assault on one of the few remaining systems in the Warrior Empire. Defences have been scrambled to the scene but is it too late?
  4. The Armada have discovered the location of the Insectorz secret weapon and are sending a fleet of their best and fastest to take it out. But can they make it in time with a blockade in the way?
  5. The Armada’s Secret Superweapon. Their Hypership’s Transwarp reactor can send it across the galaxy in mere minutes, and it can manoeuvre across the battlefield like no other.
  6. The Warrior’s unstoppable destroyer. Armed to the teeth with blasters and cannons, its crowning achievement is its impenetrable energy shield. Nothing’s getting through that in a hurry.
  7. Lurking at the edge of known space, the Insectorz are growing their most advanced bioship. This interstellar worm can consume whole planets in its gaping maw.
  8. But with all this attention turned inwards, no one is looking outside. As such, the extragalactic fleet of mysterious black cubes go unseen and unaddressed...

That's the important stuff other with. If you like this, please support! If you don't, tell me why in the comments. I'm always happy for feedback on how to grow my building skills. Keep reading for some technical stuff and a description of my thought process as I built this!

Technical Details

The set comes in at roughly 400 pieces. It's centered around a 6 x 6 Lowell Sphere with eight arms stretching off of it as tangents. It's mostly transparent pieces, for the stellar aesthetic (although it did make the renders a nightmare) with the ships in bright primary colours to stand out against the galactic background. I'm confident that the clips and stands are strong enough to hold it, especially with a central stand to support the galactic center. I designed one but it wasn't included in the renders for aesthetic reasons. The model was designed with Bricklink Studio and rendered with its inbuilt renderer. Most of the ships are built around a central Travis Brick on its side with a claw attached to its downwards-facing studs. However a few instead had their connectors attached via 1x1 plates with vertical clips. e.g. the space worm. 

The whole piece is inspired off an iconic '60s sci-fi series that is still ongoing decades later in multiple. For copyright reasons it shall remain unnamed. You can see my subtle nods to it the in the round design of the armada ships and the fleet of black cubes. However, I otherwise tried to keep things as generic as possible, appealing to the cheesy sci-fi monomyth of the '60s and '70s.

In terms of scale, I basically threw all that out the window while designing this. As such some ships are thousands of light years across and engulf whole clusters of star systems. My key goal for the model was aesthetics, not realism.

To simplify the build and reduce the amount of part diversity, for the star clusters and fighters I made them small and easily reproduceable so that the same design could be built five or six times then used when needed. The base designs of these are shown in images #8 and #13.

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