drclark

They are great - they have a more original CS feel to them than many NCS builds. I like them all. drc

This started as a real-life build with my son that then got embellished in LDD and rendered with bluerender. The design is a departure from my typical "Neo-Classic-Space" builds. Its form felt much more "organic" and the green/dark-gray color scheme felt like it should belong to a reptilian race of aliens. It is armed with 2 powerful anti-capital ship cannons that draw power directly from the main engines. it has twin light blasters mounted on the tip of each sponson as well as 4 guided missiles. The cockpit detaches and serves as an escape pod. It is a compact design with only 230 bricks and as such I had to abandon my general rule of including retractable landing gear in my designs. After it was built, it did feel like it subconsciously drew inspiration from the new-battlestar-galactica cyclon raiders. I also rendered it as a Blactron ship which felt like it could have fit the general theme. A couple of more pics at brickshelf Enjoy, drc

The build and fix set - despite being somewhat <insert that tiresome argument> - could be a good foundation for a 918/924-esque CS moc. Nice builds, drc

Nice use of a single purpose piece. How strong is the connection point between the hull and the rest of the structure. Did you do anything with the underside (or topside) of the hull.. is it filled in or did you use that space to incorporate a cargo compartment to carry a rover/buggy or something? Great little ship - drc

I finished a recent update to my TOS (MK-I) Colonial Viper in LDD/Bluerender. Thought I would render it with my MK-II version for comparison. The MK-I version is a major update over my previous versions and incorporates many of the building techniques from the MK-II version. Both feature nearly studless exteriors and fully retractable landing gear. It was quite a challenge to incorporate the landing gear while getting the shapes as accurate as possible in a "mini-fig" scale implementation. The cockpits are very cramped and not as detailed as I would typically like, but that was one of the compromises to achieve the overall form. Though, not apparent from the picture above, both models have studless under-bellies allowed by many of the newer "snot" bricks that are now available. The MK-II version contains 322 pieces and has been built in real bricks. It has been posted for some time and can be found in this brickshelf gallery The MK-I version contains 438 pieces and for now is a virtual model only. Other renders can be found in this gallery (when made public). Though previous iterations of the MK-I have been built, this one relies on many newer parts and will take some time to acquire via bricklink (if they exist in the desired colors). Thanks for looking, drc

Maybe we might have a better chance of seeing a "space-theme" if we post our designs/.lxf files on the internet and hope lepin decides to copy them....

Unbelievable build! Love the lighting. Wish I could see it in person - pictures probably don't do it justice to see all the details. Wish I had the time and piece collection to build something like that. -drc

I am blown away by all of them. I love the detail that can be achieved in micro-scale builds. I can picture all of these type of ships being in Galactica's rag-tag fleet of civies. I really like the ore hauler and the oversized cargo transport for creative use of pieces. Thanks for sharing! -drc

Both entries were cool. Great job. -drc

Hey Captain Mutant - I understand the enthusiasm for your lego ideas project but you just posted a link to it in this same thread 6 posts ago and in the "letter to lego space" thread at the same time. I am not certain of this forum's rules on self-promotion of lego ideas projects is, but continuing to direct threads discussing classic space to your project might be viewed as bad form by some. drc

I too am disappointed that the "Moments in Space" contest winner is a carnival ride firmly grounded on earth. There were plenty of cool little spaceship entries.... too bad. Maybe its symbolic in that the winning entry's description starts off with "For every moment in space, there are millions of dreamers on Earth. Keep the dream alive with the Coin Operated Cosmic Rocket Ride!" So us Lego Space fans are forced to keep dreaming of a time when Lego had a vibrant non-licensed line of space sets.

I really like it - what wheels/tires did you use?

With the public voting period over, any idea on how long it will take Lego to post the list of 25 that made it into the final selection round? Will they also be posting the vote totals for each entry (would be nice to sort the list by total votes) drc

The thing about piece count, I though the premise behind the Ideas was that the exact model may or may not be turned into a set - but the concept would be developed. Such as the case with "Ship in a Bottle". The set that was produced was significantly downsized form the model that gained 10K votes. In the case of the Adams Family house, if it was not produced solely because of the piece count, couldn't lego have still gon forward with the concept in a down-sized form? drc

I really liked classic space for the following reasons: Long running theme - Classic space was not really a theme in modern terms, it was the "3rd pillar" of the legoland sets (town and castle being the other two) that went on for nearly a decade with a consistent color schemes. This allowed a kid like me to amass a large enough collection of parts in common colors and decorative elements that I could create MOCs of my own that fit the theme without trying to explain to my parents why I needed multiple copies of the same set. I would get a few new sets for xmas and birthday every year and after awhile, I had a decent enough parts collection that I could build MOCs while having some of my favorite sets built up. I understand that this got "boring" after awhile, but once the switch to short run themes with differing color schemes happened, it was hard to build up that critical mass of parts since the primary and accent colors would change ever year or two. The older sets had better parts selection that lent well to creating MOCs even from just one set. I always liked the box art with the alternate models. Sure the primary model was sometimes clunky and the alternates even more so, but it did cause one to think about building something on your own. Lack of "overt" bad guys - the classic sets were about as close to "town in space" as you could get. There was no focus on bad guys, antagonism, etc. The classic space guys were out cruising around in their ships, launching rockets with satellites from their bases, etc. Now, we created plenty of our own bad guys for the classic space folks to fend off... but we created the story and the bad guy MOCs to go with it. Every thing now is spoon fed - insect aliens vs galaxy squad, aliens against earth defense, space police against bad guys, etc. Classic space was just there, with cool ships and bases until our imaginations got going. I grew up and missed out on futron, blacktron-1, etc. I was able to get most of Blactron2 sets, Ice planet, and on. I liked Ice-planet mostly because its color scheme was similar to classic space. In general I think everyones "favorite" theme will be what they grew up with as a kid. There are plenty of kids today that will probably be reminiscing about NexoKnights and Ninjago 20 yrs from now. Maybe to turn the discussion in a bit different direction - what was your favorite sets? Galaxy Commander was an awesome ship - I liked it way better than the Galaxy Explorer. The colors were great and the play ability was off the charts. Starfleet Voyager is probably my all time favorite ship - it was sleek and fast looking drc

The other thing I noticed is that several entries seemed like they did not conform to the size constraint for fitting on a 16x16 baseplate or the designers interpreted the "overhang" language very liberally. drc

I saw it and voted for it - cute littel craft. The alien is a nice touch drc

Voting has started today for the Lego Ideas Space Contest for a promotional give-away set. My entry is the "Cosmic Sentinel" - a small neo-classic space scouting craft. Please visit the contest page and vote for it if you would like to see this as a new lego set. Cosmic Sentinel Contest Page Thanks! drc

I'm somewhat of a blue render newbie and could not figure out how to do a custom CS logo on the nose when I rendered it. - Thanks for the replies!

Well there is an ideas contest for a space-themed give-away gift set going on now. https://ideas.lego.com/challenges/1b817aba-3990-4e6d-a17f-7a59a948d02f/brief Entries close on 2/9. Entries are size constrained to fit on a 16x16 baseplate. Hopefully this a pre-cursor to some sort of in-house space theme revival. drc

Nice ship - love the underside detailing and cockpit details.

Like it!

Like the new trans yellow canopy. Too bad it's not available in a cheaper set. Did you buy the bat cave set to get it or is it already available on bricklink? Nice design; has a very "classic" feel to it. Nice to see a moc that utilizes mostly traditional studs-up construction and doesn't go overboard with greebles. My only suggestion would be to have the bottom built in all gray would be more true to the original CS color scheme. Thanks for sharing - doug

Wow! Love it.

I grew up getting a lot of classic space sets as a kid. It was my favorite Lego theme back when there was only Town, Castle, and Space as part of the Legoland System. I really liked the Galaxy Squad sets and bought most of them (largely because my son was ~3 when they came out and I could built them with him). I kinda wished I had not passed on alien conquest sets. One of the things that I think sets CS apart from all that followed was that there were no overt bad guys - the theme was about space ships, moon bases and buggies exploring different worlds - not that we didn't make up our own bad guys to fight, but that was kind of the point with LEGO. You actually had to imagine and create your own story line back then. I would also tend not to characterize CS as a theme. Instead it was a core "product-line" that spanned many years (essentially a decade from 1978-87). It maintained more or less a consistent color scheme across many years and allowed me as a kid, living within my parents birthday/Christmas budget constraints, to build up a large, usable collection of parts in common colors and decorated elements to build MOCs from while still keeping some of my favorite sets built.... so I was able to use parts from other sets to build companion ships to the galaxy explorer. Heck back then, all sets essentially only had blue, gray, white, black for primary colors with trans yellow, blue, green for choices of canopies. Construction was all essentially studs up and the models were very basic by today's standards. I remember making my own space base layouts on a card table that could hold a 3x3 grid of crater and landing pad baseplates. So in a sense, everything was simpler and maybe more kid-friendly back then? The other thing that one also has to keep in mind is that space exploration was a relatively new, exciting area of research and development. In the late 70s we had just wrapped up the Apollo program, the joint Apollo/Soyuz missions, and skylab. All the buzz was about the new re-usable space shuttle (which most of the classic space ships LL918, LL924 and LL928 all generally resemble). I remember my 1st grade class all gathering around a TV to watch the first launch of the space shuttle. We were going to build a space station and the next stop was going to be mars. Futuristic, sci fi movies and TV shows, like Cosmos, Star Trek, Space 1999, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, 2001, and Starwars fed the interest in space. Space was part of our popular culture - a thing to be excited about in general. It was only natural for LEGO to introduce a toy line that capitalized off of the popularity of science fiction and space in general. So what happened? Somewhere along the lines our popular interest in space fizzled out. Shuttle launches became routine (with the exception of Challenger and Columbia) the construction of the space station dragged out, manned missions have been diddling around in low earth orbit for 30yrs, and our plans to go to mars stalled. Lucas wrapped up the Star Wars trilogy in 1983. Sci-fi shows began to disappear from main-stream TV. The various incarnations of Star Trek was the only real sci-fi main stay on network TV when I was in college in the 90s. Scifi became a geeky niche relegated to its own cable TV channel. During that time of the 90s and early 2000s LEGO tried to keep the interest in the space product line going by introducing the concept of factions/themes and some of the early themes are classics in their own right (Blacktron, SPI, MTRON, etc) but now the themes had very short production runs (maybe a year or two) which probably helped drive sales (new pieces in new colors) and added to collectibility, but now made it much harder for a kid to have that large collection of common colored elements to build MOCs from. The space theme became very fragmented with no real connection or continuity between themes. In general set designs suffered with the later space themes (and across a lot of Lego products) as Lego seemed to be struggling with the changes in how kids approached toys in the emerging internet/video game/digital age. When Lucas started the prequel trilogy in 1999 and revived the Star Wars franchise, LEGO scored the license rights which was and still is a huge seller (which probably helped them survive the early 2000s). This however, pretty much ended hope for a continuing LEGO space line of products. Lego did not do any space themes from 1999-2005 while the prequel triology was in theaters. They only appeared to attempt to return to their own organic space lines from 2007-2013 as interest in the Star Wars was winding down after Revenge of the Sith. In those years it would be interesting to see how the organic space themes did against updates and re-hashes of previous Star Wars sets. One of the side effects of the Star Wars and other licensed products is a demand for model/color accuracy that prior space sets did not have to worry about. On the one hand, this has been great as to achieve more true-to-scale representations of a fictional vehicle it has driven more complex building techniques into official Lego sets and other Lego products and making the sets more appealing to older kids and AFOLs. On the other hand, the color variations between models within a "theme" and within the model itself means it has become very hard to amass a "critical mass" of pieces in similar colors for MOC building without resorting to the second hand markets. In other words, the Lego sets are becoming less of a general building system and more like stand-alone "snap-together" model kits with the exception of the creator line which seems to be returning an emphasis on ability to build multiple models from one set. Now with Disney buying the Star Wars property and pumping out a new movie every year and having animated series to fill gaps in the timeline - I would not expect to see many LEGO space themes, beyond one-off ideas sets (I am thrilled with the Saturn Rocket set that is coming soon) or sets that have tie-ins to LEGO movies anytime soon. Star Wars is the only sci-fi/fantasy space theme that still appears to capture and drive popular culture. Everything other sci-fi property out there is either not kid-friendly or just too geeky to appeal to the general population. Kids are also different now. They grow out of toys earlier and move into digital media and video games at earlier ages than they did when I was a kid. The latest generation seems to be so inwardly focused on their digital devices that I think a lot of traditional youth interests and activities are starting to die out. I think that is why Lego currently seems to be so heavily dependent on licensed themes or internal themes that are tied to a TV show or movie. They seem to need to have their toys tied into a story-line or virtual world that has been fed to them than one they create in their own minds. So if we get a Lego movie set in space then we will probably see some cool space sets.... however, it won't be a continuing theme or product line unless there is a continuing media tv show tie-in or video game series tie in to keep them going. Other than that, I think an ideas set or a creator set might pop up on key "classic space anniversary dates". I would love to see a direct-to-consumer space themed set along the lines of a neo-classic space base that contains a large ship, landing pad and control center.... Just my thoughts, drc