[WIP] Babylon 5 - A dream given form.

[Captain_Quinn]

Located in grid Epsilon, deep in neutral territory (otherwise known as my dusty office in suburban Australia), Earthforce's New Lego Tech division has been at the drawing board.

A few structural/functional proof-of-concept builds have been successful enough to go to next stages of design. Estimates at this stage have this clocking in at around 2.4mtrs long and about 90cm tall. I'm designing it in modules for a number of reasons... ease of transport for exhibitions, and computing resource demands of Stud.io being the major reasons.

So far the rotating section has over 5000 bricks (at just over 5kg according to Stud.io), meaning that I'll likely have to find a way to synchronise multiple motors to provide the torque to get it turning. I'm thinking that I'll have it driven from both ends, but I'll need to do the math for the difference in gearing between front and rear in order to minimise torque/twist on the cylinder and the friction at contact points. I have an idea for how to make a stand that will reduce the load bearing requirement on the rotation mechanisms, just need to work out a few details.

[ScottishDave]

Oh, wow. This is brilliant. I'm in the middle of a geeky re-watch of B5 just now, and every time I see it on screen, I've been wondering, "how do I build this out of Lego?". I haven't planned anything the size of your project though - this is massive. I love the way you offset the panel lines on the cylinder - very true to the original.

[Hollander]

I am not familiar with Babylon 5, although I might have heard of it, but despite that this is clearly an excellent build. Is there any way you could maybe provide a picture of the inside construction of the ship? I am curious to how you build the round shape of the hull. Will be great to see this project finished. 

[Captain_Quinn]

A bit more design work, and a test assembly of the modules designed so far...

The hull cylinder is based off the circle/ring gear (4x 24121: Technic, Gear Rack 11x11 Curved) but reinforced by a combination of a series of technic lift arm frames, circular constructs using 2429 hinge plates and brackets, and a few "ring/strap" construct of 1x2 modified plates (48336 Handle on Side, 60470 U-clips on side). The proof of concept build was very rigid as well as being quite light, which is the combination I'm hoping to achieve for this part of the build.

The middle section (where the majority of blue tiles are) has the most reinforcement and is hopefully capable of helping with weight bearing, because I plan to have a series of small/soft wheel/tyre combination assembled with lift arms and pins to follow the curve and support the middle as the whole cylinder rotates about its internal axis. I have no confidence in this holding up under it's own weight by just supporting the ends, and if anything, want to minimise the ends as weight bearing points so that they can be used to drive the cylinder in rotation. I need to test what the best option for driving the cylinder rotation is... to the 'axle' of the cylinder, or to the inner gear on the end ring, or both. I may end up foregoing official Lego motors and customise some high torque, low RPM motors from the local electronics chain. I dare say that as the mass increases, changes in how this is mounted and supported will likely be needed.

So far, this is about 1.3m long, 26cm diameter at its widest, just shy of 7000 pieces and about 6.5kgs.