Dynamic Subspace

Category: Lego

  • LEGO 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer Built with Spare Bricks

    LEGO Millennium Falcon is fleeing a pursuing Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer

    Thankfully, LEGO provides digital copies of their set instruction books online. This means that if you have the bricks, you can build anything in the LEGO catalog. Of course, it might take time and energy to hunt down each individual brick and element that you might need to assemble a given set if your collection is as disorganized and binned as mine is. Nevertheless, it’s satisfying being able to build something new with what you have instead of having to go out and buy it.

    In this case, I assembled a set that didn’t buy when it came out in 2010: 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer. It took a considerable amount of time to find all of the bricks that I needed to complete it, and I had to cannibalize some other sets to get all of the parts. Eventually, it came together. However, I did have to make one off-color substitution deep within and hidden from external view.

    LEGO 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer front view
    LEGO 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer rear view
    LEGO 8099 Midi-Scale Imperial Star Destroyer side view

  • LEGO R2-D2 10225, a Reliable Desktop Companion

    LEGO R2-D2 10225 closetup of dome

    I picked up this faithful R2 unit from LEGO when I began my position as a Brittain Fellow at Georgia Tech in 2012.

    It’s the 10225 R2-D2 set that was released in 2012 (shortly before I moved back to Atlanta).

    It features a turning head, a little bit of wobble, arms, saw, data port interface, and a retractable third leg. It’s blockier looking than the 2021 R2-D2 75308 set, but its the blockiness that makes it endearing.

    LEGO R2-D2 10225 front
    LEGO R2-D2 10225 dome turned
    LEGO R2-D2 10225 left side
    LEGO R2-D2 10225 back
    LEGO R2-D2 10225 right side
    LEGO R2-D2 10225 tools deployed
    LEGO R2-D2 10225 third leg extended

    Though, be warned that R2, when left to his own devices, might try to hack your computer . . .

    LEGO R2-D2 hacking my desktop computer

  • LEGO 21304 Doctor Who’s TARDIS: It’s Bigger on the Inside

    My favorite Doctor Who is the Fourth Doctor, portrayed by Tom Baker, but the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi Doctors aren’t too bad. Regardless of the era, the TARDIS is always bigger on the inside. Here’s some renditions of the TARDIS and recent Doctors and villians–LEGO 21304 Doctor Who and 71204 and 71238 Dimensions sets.

  • Weezer Performance Stage at Key Arena Nov. 2001 LEGO MOC

    In Fall 2001, I flew out to Seattle to visit friends and go to two shows–Tori Amos at the Paramount and Weezer at Key Arena.

    After I returned home, I built this LEGO MOC (my own creation) of the Weezer stage. At that point, I only had some Star Wars LEGO sets, so I had to pick up some additional bricks and minifigures to create this model. Notably, I purchased the cheapest Harry Potter set (for the bespectacled Rivers Cuomo) and a large brick assortment set for the stage base and back.

    I based the stage arrangement on Weezer’s stage design at the Key Arena performance. They had a backdrop covered with equally distant squares. Lights behind the black squares illuminated and played lights on the backdrop. In front of the stage back was a large stylized “W” that descended from above when the band began playing.

    To mount the stage back at 90 degrees to the stage base, I used stub-and-fork friction joint bricks.

    For the backdrop lights, I used battery-powered Christmas lights.

    For the stylized “W,” I cut it out from card stock.

    Also, I used card sock to cut out guitar and bass shapes that I taped to rods that the minifigures held.

    Apologies for the quality of the photos. I took the photos with my second digital camera. The first was a Sony Mavica with 3.5″ floppy disk. I sold it and purchased a Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-P3 (I think). I’m lucky to have these photos as I think I took them more to experiment with the camera than to memorialize the LEGO model!

  • Rogue One Is The Most Real Star Wars Film

    While Rogue One (2016) comes in second to my love of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the former film is more real in terms of foregrounding real people who want to fight back against the oppression of the Empire at all costs. The characters realize the stakes are high, but they fight on anyways. There is minimal space wizardry and instead people working together to support each other in the face of overwhelming odds.

    Rogue One also signaled an inclusive-focused shift in Star Wars storytelling–a long needed correction to the franchise. Hopefully this trend will continue both in front of and behind the camera. And, with the new Andor (2022-) series, this corner of the Star Wars universe has new stories unfolding.

    While Rogue One is far from perfect, it does a lot of things perfectly. One aspect of its perfection that’s important to me are its merchandising with LEGO. It had a large number of sets, which LEGO mercilessly divided main character minifigures between (as it did for The Hobbit, too). Nevertheless, the overall design of the U-Wing Fighter, Krennic’s Imperial Shuttle, Battle on Scarif (above), and AT-ST (which I currently have on my desk). These sets tied into the imaginative world of the film quite well and I certainly enjoyed building them.