Construction Details
08/21/2004
Overall, the ship is 12 feet, 8 inches long and weighs 118 pounds. That works out to 487 studs. Yep, I came within about 6 inches of hitting 500 studs in length. Oh well, next time. An approximate piece count is 40,000. It took me about 9 months to build. The inspiration for it came from an article from Discover magazine.
When designing a creation on such a massive scale, you can't just dive right in. In the case of this one, I used a 3D solid modelling program called Pro/E to model the shape of the ship to make sure it was in scale.
The ship itself comes apart into 4 pieces. It separates at the back of the main crew module, and on either side of the fuel tanks. For display, each of the 7 removeable drawers are mounted on technic rails and can be removed. I never bothered to take final pictures of the drawers sliding out, but if you're feeling ambnitious, you can track them down in the construction images. The side panels all just rest in place and can be easily removed to expose the drawers. Each drawer features two technic pins that can lock the drawers in place.
Special thanks to Geoff Gray for taking all these pictures at Brickfest 04, Tom McDonald from whom I stole the pinball machine, Jon Palmer who gave me the idea to build the decks as removeable drawers, all the Bricklink stores without whom I never would've been able to source an extra 2500 tiles, and everybody else who I bounced ideas off of and stole from.
These are the pictures I took during construction of the model. You can see some interesting insight as to how to build big. Also included are the Pro/E model that I created for an idea of scale, and scans of the Discover Magazine article.
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