An Alien Fleet

I love LEGOs. I loved them as a kid, "got over them" in middle school, and now as an adult (sort of) love them again. There's something about the flexibility/creativity without the coordination of, say, sketching that I find appealing. 3D modeling made simple if you. And when you're done, you have something that you can swoosh around and make fun sound effects with. What's not to love?

In case you didn't know, there is a whole online community devoted to LEGO CAD (Computer Assisted Design): LDraw is probably the best place to start, although LEGO does have an offering that they call LDD. The trouble with LDD is that it has only a tiny subset of all the pieces that LEGO has ever made. The cool thing about LDD is that not only is the interface super intuitive (try it - you'll be amazed) but after you build something you really like, you can (as long as you use the right subset of their already small part library) order your model from LEGO and they'll print instructions and ship you your model in a box. Really cool idea. If ever they had their complete part library available, LDD would be an amazing tool to use.

But they don't, so if you want to play around with LEGO CAD, I recommend LDraw + MLCad (only available on Windows; runs under wine and darwine). There are some offerings for the Mac, but they're not nearly as good as MLCad in terms of function or ease of use.

I've been fascinated by the Alien-themed LEGO sets for a while - probably since they came out, though that happened in middle school when I wasn't playing with LEGOs anymore. In particular, I really like the saucer pieces, though I've found them a challenge to incorporate into my models. Here are some "sets" I've designed in the past couple of weeks that I think are pretty cool. I've got one more in the computer that I remain unhappy with (it's a huge ship with several thousand pieces) and one more in my basement that I built out of physical bricks that I need to model in the computer. That latter will show up here in a bit, I hope. In the meantime, here are some sets I've built and modeled or just modeled; all of the "pictures" are renderings with POV-Ray using L3P and the LGEO part library (that link seems to be broken - don't know what to tell you).


The above is the first I built. Tracy gave me the inspiration for it, by snapping together some wings and some little saucer pieces. I rounded it out and made it a practical model. I call it Alien Runabout. It's relatively straightforward with no surprises, though I think it looks pretty cool.


This is the third model I built. David designed the basic layout and I finished it out. The pods above the wing/saucers were tricky; the front of the ship is heavily inspired by the Warp Wing Fighter, though it is not identical. I had hoped to make it possible to dock the Runabout on top of this ship, but couldn't find an elegant way to do it. Anywhere from 3-5 men (or aliens) can fit in this ship. I call it the Alien Gunboat.


I thought this one up while I was in bed one morning trying to convince myself to get up. It's bizarre because I took two saucer "tops" and stuck them together side-by-side. This one was completely modeled - I've not (yet) built it (I'd have to take apart a couple of my current models to do it). Here it is from a different angle:


I call this one the Alien Scoutpod. It's a Scoutpod because it's not actually a complete ship. Two of these join together to form a "complete" ship - which is rather fun. Here's what it looks like when two of these are joined:


This one I call the Alien Scoutship. It's a bit weird, too, because the guys are sitting sideways (no, they're not in the rendering - you didn't miss anything). I figure the ship has gravity like the Millennium Falcon's quad-laser turrets so that both of the guys feel like they're sitting normally. The structure onto which the two pods join looks like this:


If you have enough imagination, you can see that this core structure is, in fact, a drone that can fly off on scouting missions of its own while the two pods are off running around. Or, one of the pods can mate with the drone to form a more powerful sub-ship while one of the pods scouts. Flexibility like this, I've discovered, makes LEGO creations more fun to play with, in addition to just being cool. Here's a final view of the Scoutship, more from the top:


I'll see about getting the ship in my basement modeled up this week so I can post it. It's enormous, so it'll take a good bit of time.