Menapian

I'm not 100% convinced by that Kirk head and hair - as others have said, it's a bit more Chris Pine than William Shatner! However, with the Shrek CMF coming out around the same time, I think the Prince Charming head could do a decent job replacing it. It's got a confident smile on one side, and an angry "KHAAAN!" face on the other. Paired with the Superman hair in Dark Tan or Medium Nougat, I think this could make for a more convincing Kirk overall. Off topic: has anyone been having errors embedding Flickr pictures recently? I tried to copy and insert a link to this image as usual, and it embedded a completely random photo which isn't even in my photostream.

This looks like lots of fun, and I'm hoping the listed $200 price is accurate. A few of the face prints could have been improved - somehow, that Kirk face and hair doesn't quite scan for me - but overall a pretty impressive set!

Exciting to hear that we're probably getting more than just the bridge, and maybe this helps to justify that steep price! A GWP of the much-reused Vasquez Rocks location with a Gorn for Kirk to tussle with would be perfect. I actually designed a working TOS version of the transporter room based on the TNG transporter room I shared a few months ago, with a mechanism to revolve the transporter and make the away team beam up or down. I had intended to put it up on Rebrickable as well, but maybe there's no point given the official version we're apparently getting. It'll be interesting to see how similar or different the official Lego version ends up! Here are some pics:

Thanks! Getting the top curve of the front facade right was tricky and involved more calculator usage than I'm used to, but I'm really happy with how the arched glass roof turned out. Thanks, the Megalosaurus was definitely one of the most fun parts of the build. The real Crystal Palace dinosaurs have recently had restoration works done, and are well worth a visit if you ever make it to London!

Bring the greatest artwork of Ancient Greece to life in this set recreating the Parthenon Marbles and the Festival of Athena! My latest Lego Ideas project is now gathering support over on the Ideas website, where you can also find more pictures and details about the build and the history behind it: The Parthenon Marbles: The Festival of Athena. Every summer for almost a thousand years, the citizens of Athens gathered for a huge festival honouring their patron Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Dancing to flutes and lyres and carrying sacred offerings, hundreds of celebrants would wind their way from the streets of the city up to the high temples of the Acropolis. When the great statesman Pericles ruled the city in the 5th century BC, he immortalised this festival in a giant marble frieze which ran around all four sides of the Parthenon, Athena's greatest monument. The sculptor Phidias captured the citizens of Athens in vivid scenes of music, athletics, dancing, and ritual procession, crafting an ancient masterpiece which still amazes audiences today - the Parthenon Marbles. This 2,026-piece Lego set pays tribute to the Parthenon Marbles in three layers: a base showing the frieze being sculpted, a middle layer bringing its carved figures to life in a colourful street scene, and a microscale Acropolis looming over the rooftops. The varied cast of minifigures can be set up to match their procession poses from the frieze or used imaginatively to play out your own scenes of life in the Golden Age of Athens! With this approach I wanted to recreate not only the marble frieze itself, but the incredible city and people that it captured in stone - the philosophers, priestesses, warriors, poets, and politicians who still spark our imaginations when we read about Ancient Greece or encounter its timeless works of art. I selected a sample of the key figures from the frieze, including: aprobates charioteers, who showed off their prowess by jumping in and out of their moving chariots; Athena acolytes who presented the goddess with a new peplos robe at the climax of the festival; bearded elders of the city, who I've used as an excuse to add celebrity cameos from the philosopher Socrates and Pericles himself; sacred musicians playing flutes and lyres; ...and the sculptor Phidias at the base of the set, hard at work with hammer and chisel. Just 368 more figures to go! If you like this project, please do head on over to the Ideas website where it's now gathering support. All votes, comments, and shares are very much appreciated!

For 1,701 pieces (harhar), I have my fingers crossed that the price is towards the lower end of that 200-240 range. This probably won't be a day 1 purchase, but I would like it especially as a basis for more Star Trek MOCs. (I've already done a rebuild of my TNG transporter room as a TOS version - now just need Scotty to do the beaming up!)

Thanks everyone, you're very kind! I'm working on a few more Trek and non-Trek builds and will be sure to post them on here when they're ready.

Thanks! I experimented with a few ways of showing the dematerialize effect, including side-on tiles and all-white minifigs with white bars around them. But in the end, the floating stars just felt like the most fun and authentically 'Lego' way to do it.

Thanks, I appreciate it! I went back and forth on whether or not to include the LCARS detailing as it adds a decent amount to the piece count, but I think it definitely elevates the display value enough to make it worth it.

Here's my latest Star Trek: The Next Generation build - a recreation of the Enterprise-D transporter room with a Technic mechanism that allows you to assemble your away team on the transporter plate, then spin a lever to watch them dematerialize and disappear. You can also spin the lever counter-clockwise to reverse the process and beam them back up! Instructions are available now on Rebrickable. The set is 1,146 pieces and should cost just over $100/€100 to assemble, depending on location, availability, postage etc. The MOC also recreates the rest of the Enterprise-D transporter room, from the main door and the green girder walls to Chief Miles O'Brien's transporter console. I've used a General Tagge minifig head with some Medium Nougat coiled hair to make a minifig version of the hardest-working engineer in Starfleet. Finally, the elevated front panel of the transporter room includes a recreation of the iconic LCARS computer graphics from the transporter console, so you can tap at them and supply your own 'bleep-bloop' sound effects while you transport your crew. Since getting the Enterprise-D set for Christmas, I've been working on lots of playscale builds to give the minifigs something to do, including a bridge diorama and a viewscreen with microscale ships, both of which are also available on Rebrickable. I'm still working on more Star Trek builds, so watch this space! Thanks for looking.

Thanks for the kind feedback, everyone. I'm glad that so many of you have enjoyed the build and found the subject original and engaging! I'd encourage anyone who's interested to look into Mandeville's Travels - it's a fascinating book which shaped European ideas about the world for centuries. On his voyage in 1492, Columbus wrote back to Spain noting that he hadn't encountered any Mandeville-style monsters yet, but he was sure there might be some on the next island over...

This looks great, well done! Quite apart from the quality of the film, sometimes a design can just catch your imagination and challenge you to build it. If anything, ROS being a dud means the ships from it probably haven't been built too much already, so you can bring something fresh to the table.

Thanks, you're very kind! I read Baudolino years ago and remember enjoying how surreal it became as he wandered off the edge of the map. Maybe time for a reread!

I love the wild and surreal imagination of medieval writing and illustration, and it doesn't get any wilder than Sir John Mandeville's fourteenth-century Book of Marvels and Travels, which is packed full of dog-headed men, phoenixes, headless people with faces on their chests, and lambs growing from trees. In this MOC, I've tried to recreate some of these supposed wonders in the style of medieval illustrationss - you can see some of the images that inspired me at the end of the Flickr album. The author of Mandeville's Travels claimed to be an English knight who had travelled to the Holy Land in the 1320s, and then on to China and the mythical kingdom of the African Christian king Prester John. In fact, most of the text was stitched together from other travel accounts and classical texts, and 'John Mandeville' himself may well have been an invention of the real anonymous author. Still, the book was a huge sensation and became of the most widely-read and circulated manuscripts of the Middle Ages - more copies of Mandeville have survived than of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and centuries later travellers in the Age of Exploration still relied on his work. In this MOC, I've recreated: - a wonky medieval lion (possibly drawn by someone who had never seen the real thing). - a blemmye, one of a race of headless men with faces on their chest. Mandeville described them as "ugly folk without heads, who have eyes in each shoulder". This one seems pretty friendly, though. - the King of the Cynocephali, the dog-headed people who lived on a remote island and worshipped an ox. Mandeville described this king as "a very faithful and righteous man" whose kingdom was safe and justly-ruled. Definitely a good boy. - a phoenix, described by Mandeville as a colourful and long-lived bird with a comb like a peacock, which returned to a certain temple in Egypt every 500 years to be ritually burned on the altar before reviving after three days in the ashes. - the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary, a legendary plant which was said to grow living sheep as its fruit. (This may have been a misinterpretation based on hearing rumours about cotton plants.) - ...and finally, a little vignette of 'Mandeville' himself bragging about his unlikely travels to a rather bewildered audience. I hope you enjoy it!

Looks great, very nice work! You've captured the tricky sloped shaping very well in those side panels, and I love those side gun turrets.

Thanks, I appreciate it! The omnibus coach was very fun to research and put together with all its Lego-themed advertisements. Maybe I'll have to share some of my inspirations for it in a future update. That historical figures CMF would be a dream! I love collecting the occasional historical figures that pop up, like Abe Lincoln and Shakespeare from the Lego Movie series.

I'm happy to report that this project has just hit 4,000 votes - thank you to everyone who has supported it and shared it around! I've posted a new update on the Ideas page (link: LEGO Ideas The Crystal Palace) with some of the stories and images that inspired the exhibits. I hope you enjoy it, and do please share the project with anyone you think might like it!

Thanks, I appreciate it! I do like density of detail that stickers can add, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rumoured official TOS set. But here, I really wanted to make it feel as complete as possible just using regular bricks, to make it easier for people to build and enjoy it. I've had a few more brick orders arrive and have now finally been able to complete the viewscreen section and a few of the microscale ship builds - pictures below. I'm really satisfied with how the forced perspective/microscale ships have turned out in person - it gives a nice sense of life and colour to the build. Hopefully my next orders will arrive quickly and I can build more of the microscale fleet and callers!

No problem. When you get the MOC on Rebrickable (Enterprise-D Bridge Diorama) it should give you both the PDF instructions and a full parts list. You can export that parts list to a seller site like BrickLink, and figure out which parts you might already have to put towards the build. Then you can do an automatic search to find the rest of the pieces at the lowest price from BrickLink shops in your region. Hope that helps!

Thanks! The viewscreen builds were great fun, and I love using forced perspective in builds like that. Unfortunately that Tasha Yar head isn't available in Light Nougat as a real piece - only Medium Brown. But there is a pretty close equivalent for the frowning expression in this head, if you want to put together a custom Tasha. I was looking around for other custom crew options, and I reckon the new General Tagge head from the UCS Death Star works pretty well for Miles O'Brien. It's also surprisingly cheap from quite a few Bricklink stores at the moment, considering it comes from a $1,000 set.

Thanks @RichardGoring, I appreciate it! If you end up building it, do let me know how you get on - I'd really value any feedback. It'll be interesting to see if we get more official playscale sets like the rumoured TOS diorama, and what size they might come in at. I'm working on a few more TNG designs at the moment - a transporter room and a holodeck, so far - and I'll be sure to post them on the forum when they're ready.

I've been working on a TNG bridge diorama set myself, so my heart definitely skipped a beat when I saw the leaked news! I was honestly glad to see that it was a TOS set, and as people have said, it makes sense to vary the approach to the theme a bit. It'll be very interesting to see what size and approach they take for the TOS bridge diorama. Will the piece count need to hit a certain level to justify including the entire core crew, I wonder? My bridge is pretty compressed at 918 pieces, but fits decently well on the shelf with the Enterprise-D.

Thanks, I appreciate it! I've actually just managed to get the instructions for both MOCs up on Rebrickable, so you can check them out if you're interested: MOC-256838 - Star Trek TNG Enterprise-D Bridge Diorama MOC-257015 - Star Trek TNG Enterprise-D Viewscreen My Bricklink orders for the diorama just recently arrived, so I've now actually built the main set - a very nice home for the minifigs, and it fits well on the shelf with the Enterprise. I know we're supposed to be getting a TOS diorama set later this year, but Picard deserves to sit down too. He's been through a lot!

Excellent work, and I love the idea of mini-dioramas. The dark blue-black minifigs for holograms in the third build is really clever, and the Gungan statue head has some great parts usage. Looking forward to seeing more!

Thanks, I appreciate it! It's an awkward little shape and took quite a while to get looking right, considering it's just a handful of pieces. I've completed the viewscreen module now and have a few more pictures to share. As well as the microscale ships and space scenery, I had fun creating some 2D tile art panels depicting the various alien species who hail the Enterprise.