[MOC] Steampunk Airship Gunboat

[ProvenceTristram]

Spent all night and morning, starting about 13 hours ago, working on it. I wound up settling on an open flying bridge with doghouses on the ends because nothing else really looked as good, in the end. It's a *little* funky to my eyes, but hell - it's steampunk.

Haven't decided on a name yet.

Surprisingly, this doesn't have that many pieces, relative to its pretty enormous size. 

[LM71Blackbird]

Pretty inventive looking! Nice details and cool way to use those ship hull pieces! Keep up the great work!

[Littleworlds]

This is quite a piece of madness! You certainly approach things from a different angle compared to ship-building standards.  Great! 

The position of the balloons helps creating a keel-shape and I like the maintenance-walkway. Nice piece of detail! The engine-pods are looking great with their mounts as well. Overall a quite factual, realistic look, despite the layout. That certainly adds to its believability as something that "could" exist (if physics turn a blind eye for a moment^^). I would have made a more dreadnought-style hull though. This one seems too much like viking longboat to me. Still, a really cool design!

[Digger of Bricks]

The shots of this craft from both the bow and the stern are the coolest! A most novel airship!  

[ProvenceTristram]

7 hours ago, Littleworlds said:

This is quite a piece of madness! You certainly approach things from a different angle compared to ship-building standards.  Great! 

The position of the balloons helps creating a keel-shape and I like the maintenance-walkway. Nice piece of detail! The engine-pods are looking great with their mounts as well. Overall a quite factual, realistic look, despite the layout. That certainly adds to its believability as something that "could" exist (if physics turn a blind eye for a moment^^). I would have made a more dreadnought-style hull though. This one seems too much like viking longboat to me. Still, a really cool design!

The problem is that I try (most of the time) to design things that can be built without spending $1000 USD, or.more. When using preformed Lego hulls, one obviously surrenders creativity for frugality - the longboat hull was a concession to numbers.

The funny thing is, I can't even see it anymore. I mean, sure, if I squint, I can tell what it is... but I don't view it necessarily as something Viking. My dad upon looking at it, however, immediately said "oh, Vikings!" so clearly this is a product of me having stared at it for too long :P

Basically, I wanted to achieve something that looked sharp and trim (a counter to so many of the pirate-themed Airships you see), but could actually be assembled one day, taking inspiration from some Spanish-American War gunboats.

It's by no means perfect (I usually prefer bigger vehicles to have interiors, but no matter what I did to cram in a captain's cabin, it degraded the overall look), but I think for a ship intended to be a close-in patrol craft (rather than, say, a much larger destroyer, light cruiser, battlecruiser, battleship, etc.), it probably works.

I am definitely open to criticism, though - I actually tore it apart a few minutes ago to see if lengthening the hull could give me a little more space to play with (it wouldn't; because of how much space the balloons eat up, in order to achieve this same neat fit, I would have to have blown it up by 4 hull sections, and at that point you're probably going from like 1,200 pieces to something closer to 2,000).

Edited May 7, 2018 by ProvenceTristram