Tag Archives: shuttle

Life on Mars*

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Lego Mars Shuttle

It is conceivable that humans will land on Mars well within our lifetime. This means that even if there isn’t alien life on Mars, there will be, well… alien life on Mars. For the first time in the history of mankind, we will be aliens.

Flickr’s Andreas Lenander imagines what a landing in 2050 could look like with his ‘HORN’ shuttle, complete with a rather splendid looking Martian surface.

Fast forward a few decades and driving across Mars will be as mundane as trucking up the M40. At least according to fellow Flickrer Luis Baixinho and his Mars Truck.

See more of each build via the links in the text above.

Lego Mars Rover

*The title of this post definitely comes from this rather than this. Sorry LEGO, it wasn’t one of your finest efforts, even with the Futurama-esque tubes.

To Boldly Go

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Lego Star Trek Galileo

We really don’t understand the appeal of Start Trek. From our limited knowledge of the show we have determined that it was mostly William Shatner visiting a variety of alien planets, whose principal characteristic seemed to be being shoddily constructed from cardboard, in order to pick up hot alien babes. Oh, now we get it.

Countless nerds loved Star Trek for the aforementioned reasons, and this mini-figure scale recreation of the U.S.S. Enterprise’s ‘Galileo’ shuttle will enable mini-figure Captain Kirk to leave the confines of his ship in order to boldly go where no man has gone before.*

It’s been built by Stephan Niehoff who has done a rather impressive job, fitting his Galileo shuttle with a full interior and even building a suitably ropey-looking planet – complete with hot alien babe – on which to land it. There’s more to see at Stephan’s Flickr album, where you can watch Captain Kirk’s Art of Seduction in action.

Lego Star Trek Galileo

*In exact contrast to this TLCB writer and your Mom.

Tough Transport

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Lego Sci-Fi Transport Shuttle

As regular readers will know, we are not a sci-fi blog, and frankly we struggle with anything that doesn’t have wheels in multiples of two. However this brilliantly designed Transport Shuttle is too cool for us to pass up, and it’s staffed by some of the meanest-looking mini-figures that we’ve ever seen. Flickr’s Horcik Designs is the creator behind it and you can see more via the link above. Just don’t ask what’s in the briefcase…

Lego Shuttle

The Ultimate Supercar

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… Is one that goes into space…

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Until 1996, the top-of-the-range Technic set was always a car. Then Lego had another idea. Welcome to TLCB’s review of set 8480, the Technic Space Shuttle.

With only a handful of pieces more than the 8880 supercar, but the addition of some 9V electrics, this retailed for $30 or so more. Since I was recently privileged to put one together, I thought I’d tell you, our esteemed reader, all about it.

First of all, the box is huge. Ma-hoo-sive, as I’m told some people say… rather more than is necessary; although having a plastic tray to sort the pieces into is a boon. Unlike new sets of this size, there is just the one – thickish – instruction book, which covers both the shuttle and the submarine B-model. This naturally means that every build step involves quite a lot more than it would now… the assembly of this large and complex model is broken down into just 40 build steps.

You know that warm feeling of accomplishment you get when you complete a model? Well, you get a similar frisson for completing EVERY PAGE of this. You do need to concentrate, partly because of the relatively large amount of pieces added at each step, but also because there will be ONE piece added somewhere, at the other end of the model from most of the rest, that you will miss. It’s like  40 pages of ‘Where’s Waldo’… If this sounds like complaining, it isn’t; this was a properly challenging and very enjoyable build.

I do have a couple of TLCB Top Tips: At an early stage, you attach two 2×6 black plates with holes to the underside. Leave these off until much later, as you’ll only knock them off many times until they are attached at more than one end. It’ll spare your sanity, I promise… Another thing – make sure you test these near-20 year old electrics; especially the two long wires that are carefully routed along the length of the fuselage from an early stage of the build. If you discover one of these doesn’t work later on, it’s major surgery to remove it. This leads to swearing…

After many hours of careful assembly, you will have a Technic model of unusual handsomeness, and a (for the time) quite staggering technical density. Time to see what it does. Continue reading →