r/LegoSpaceships

This is a redesign of one of my older MOCs. Back in 2024, I started designing what is now called the UNSC Terminus, my current Valiant-class USC ship model. As time went by, I learnt a lot more and made improvements, but I also received feedback that has been included here. While the design looks similar, a lot has changed. From the outside, it's much more detailed and also much more faithful to the original design. To achieve this, I redid all of the original 'armour plates' and completely overhauled the engines. But I didn't stop there, this time I wanted to include an interior that adds to the look and gives the ship more life. While doing that, I adjusted the panels so they can be easily removed, and I also cleaned up a lot. On top of that, I'm about to fully rewrite the instructions.

For those who don't know the ship, it's a Valiant-class super heavy cruiser from the Halo universe. The UNSC Everest served as Admiral Preston Cole's flagship. This particular MOC is currently 85 cm long and has 9,000 parts, many of which are small. Oh, and also the ship is much darker IRL!

Well, enought talking, enjoy the photos and enjoy your day! Cheers!

Experience the perfect integration of aerodyne and anti-gravity technologies. Travel anywhere on the planet in Auburn's latest luxury SOV (Sub-Orbital Vehicle). Introducing the 2135 Skyster. Finance options available at local Auburn dealerships.

This is the new carrier for my fleet. The doors on the sides open and close. It’s 70 studs long and had over 3,200 parts.

The renders are finished but already I can see physical changes I’ll make to the model once I order the right bricks.

Think of the Helghast were a more technologically advanced peoples with relegious fanaticism (thus the cathedral inspired superstructure on top, inspired by warhammer/halo convenant)

Hope you like so far! Excited to build this one

Classic Space hooked its claws into me irrevocably when it came about in the late '70s. It remains my favorite of all LEGO themes and I wish fervently that sci-fi Space was an evergreen theme like City or Ninjago. For this build, I paired my love of CS with my passion for Macross with its pantheon of transformable fighters and spaceships. The original Monster, which featured in Super Dimensional Fortress: Macross, was a huge non-transforming artillery mech. In 1999, Shoji Kawamori redesigned it to feature a three-mode conversion much like the variable fighters that feature so prevalently in the various Macross series. To my eyes, it's a beautiful design, one I wished very much to capture in a MOC. This model is actually my second attempt. It skews much closer to Kawamori's art than my previous version, which was larger and more complex, but ultimately too heavy for the available joints at the time. I wanted to build this in dark tan with red and dark grey accents, but many of the parts I needed didn't exist in those colors at the time. I had a lot of blue and grey, however, and i thought CS livery would look pretty cool on this mech. See if you agree.

Are alternative brands allowed? Pretty good quality and printing (though the nameplate is a sticker); features a steam generator and lighting. A bit delicate in places.

3...2...1...Let's Jam!

After adding about another 10 versions to my Swordfish with the test build to improve the look and functionality of the engine, I got the urge to rewatch Cowboy Bepop again and loved seeing all the ships doing their thing. So yeah, I had to build those as well!

Edit: Forgot scale…these are in Microfig Scale so about half Minifig scale.

Both MOCs are ships are from The Expanse franchise, one being based on the MCRN Orion-Class Frigate (orange) and an the unknown-class Destroyer (blue).

The bulbous head of the Orion-Class frigates are high-density missile batteries capable of pumping out up to twelve torpedoes at once, allowing this little frigate to punch way above its weight and overwhelm other vessels of similar caliber. It's five Point Defense cannons give it a full sphere of protective coverage against incoming torpedoes and make it a reasonable danger for anything that decides to get too close without a railgun.

The Destroyer is a little less special. It carries four single-tube torpedo magazines and four point-defense cannons. Unfortunately, it's PDC arrangement leaves a large blindspot around the main engine. It is, however, disproportionately small compared to its main engine and is therefore much quicker and nimbler than one would expect for such a cheap production.

Animated in Blender because why not? :D

LEGENDS returns for Volume 4.

Three ships. Three very different corners of science fiction. And probably the most technically awkward trio I’ve tried to squeeze into this scale so far.

As always, each ship is paired with a tiny scene from its world and a set of Character Studdies™.
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PROJECT HAIL MARY: The Hail Mary

Amaze amaze amaze!

The Hail Mary is built to display in both of its configurations: its standard flight mode, or opened out into centrifuge gravity mode, with the two ends of the ship extended around the central axis.

The scene recreates Grace and Rocky’s first proper meeting, separated by that transparent wall of xenonite in the connecting tunnel. There’s also a tiny display showing the Petrova Line running between Tau Ceti and Adrian - the green planet where Grace and Rocky eventually make their rather important discovery. Its made with transparent red pieces which would look very cool lit up...

Character Studdies™ include Ryland Grace, Rocky, Eva Stratt, Boyce and, of course, Armando.
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FIREFLY: Serenity

Serenity was ridiculously difficult at this size.

There are barely any straight lines on the thing. Getting all of those angles, curves, engine shapes and organic bits of detailing to read as Serenity without making the model substantially larger took a lot of messing around.

The accompanying scene is the classic Train Job, with a blurred high-speed landscape rushing past behind Mal, Zoe and Jayne as they secure the cargo.

Character Studdies™ include Mal, Zoe, Jayne, Kaylee, River, Wash and Inara, complete with one of her classic elegant sheer outfits.
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BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: Galactica

And finally, Galactica.

This one might be my favourite bit of micro-engineering in the collection. There is a lot going on in the shape of this ship, and somehow it all had to fit into a tiny footprint.

There are some really fun SNOT techniques, reversed stud directions and slightly ridiculous connections buried inside to get the armour, flight pods and layered hull details where they need to be. I think the result is crazy accurate for the scale.

The scene is the Galactica hangar deck, featuring a super cute version of Starbuck’s red-and-white, three-engined Viper Mk II. It even has a movable access ladder, and the Viper itself lifts straight out when it inevitably needs to be swooshed around the room.

Character Studdies™ are William Adama, Laura Roslin, Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, Lee “Apollo” Adama, Saul Tigh, Gaius Baltar and Number Six.
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Three more ships added to the LEGENDS fleet.

Hail Mary. Serenity. Galactica.

What should be in Volume 5?

Here's the other ship I've been working on while I was working on the Arklyt Shadow.

Considered the nemesis of the Arklyt group, The Manticore Heavy gunship sports an outrageously fast engine cluster and serious armament.

Again this builds involves lots of inverted bricks, inset nested connection points and just about every red brick I owned. All of these builds are never done in studio. Just tried and true trial and error. Built using bulk bin and second hand bricks (minus the tran blue accents). Just listening to the bricks and seeing what comes.

Length: 1658 m

Height: 410 m

Width: 483 m

When The Great Insectoid War emerged, Galactic Federation faced severe lacking of modern big battlecruiser/carrier type capital ships that were much needed to the war effort. Existing battlecruisers, such as Brutus-class, although were cheap to build, but also obsolete and was too highly specialized as artillery ships, while light spacecraft played a huge role in combat; dedicated spacecraft carriers also had flaws, being underarmed, underarmored and straight up too small to manage combat without a support group, which is a big issue when whole fleet experience a huge lack of vessels.

So engineers rolled up their sleeves and started to design new multipurpose capital ship class, that would serve roles of both battlecruiser and spacecraft carrier. In its development designers used the experience of their colleagues to the fullest: new vessel featured a hull that partly consisted of large sections - much like in Brutus and a plethora of earlier designed cargo vessels; design team also actively used pre-war battleship projects to reduce the overall cost and fasten the development.

Most difficult part was in creating engines that will provide this behemoth with enough speed and agility. In original project Sarissa ought to be driven by two colossal engines that also feature thrust-vectoring for maneuverability, and although those motors were an engineering marvel, but two of them wasn't enough for certain scenarios, so design team added 4 more engines, much smaller though, that gave Sarissa additional trust and served as back-up engines.

Although this vessel meant to be sort of a blend of battlecruiser and a carrier, it featured solid armament, which would be the envy of any other battleship. It had numerous heavy rapid-firing turbolaser batteries, a plethora lighter plasma cannons, rocket launchers and anti-spacecraft guns and dozens of torpedoes and ballistic missiles, all of which would be more than enough for a ship of its type... But it also mounted 4 artillery pieces originally designed for planetary defense systems that could destroy in one shot vessels of up to a frigate size. Even navy officials rated all this weaponry as a bit overkill for such ship.

Even though many vessels from first production series came into service underarmed and sometimes even lacking four additional engines due to logistic issues, their combat performance was excellent and they swiftly became flagships in many fleets. In conditions where warships often had to operate in very small groups due to a general shortage of vessels, these multi-functional battleships came in very handy, providing both overwhelming firepower and good protection as well as a considerable spacecraft group.

However, it was not without drawbacks: the huge firepower required an incredible amount of energy, just like the engines, and this created a lot of problems. For example, heavy fire from all the guns overheated the reactors very quickly, and if the ship maneuvered at the same time, then overheating could occur in a matter of minutes. Because of this, the captains tried to use weapons quite sparingly, and the four main guns were hardly used at all, with rare exceptions.

Also, despite the high degree of automation of processes on board, there was hardly enough space for supplies and personnel on board - most of the space inside was occupied by weaponry and spacecraft. All this led to the fact that at the beginning of the Sarissa-class operational use the crews either had to constantly replenish their supplies by entering ports or intersecting with supply ships, wasting time, or abandoning part of the ammunition, spacecraft groups or even rescue capsules. Because of this, very often ships of this type were not on long-range combat missions where they were sometimes needed the most.

However, when the situation for the fleet ceased to be so deplorable and the Federation fully established the production of ships in the required quantity, small groups of supply ships were assigned to the Sarissa's, which provided their crews with ammunition, supplies and fuel during long patrols, and during the battle went to the rear, which fully revealed the potential of Sarissa-class.

Despite the fact that until the second half of the war there was no more than one Sarissa in a single fleet, their combat use as flagships was extremely successful. As the fighting took on a larger scale, the Federation fleet received more and more ships of this type, and subsequently they became the basis of the fleet. Even though these ships were expensive to manufacture and repeatedly tried to replace them with newer vessels, Sarissa-class became the most numerous battlecruiser of the entire war.

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So I decided to try posting my stuff here on Reddit. Usually I post only on my Flickr page but it feels like it is slowly dying. We'll see how it goes. May post more of my previous builds later.

It is Stepola's unpublished build that I tweaked to my taste, mostly by reducing number of artillery points and designing completely new set of engines.

Just felt a need to make a Medium Battleship for MFZ: IO.

All 3 designed by Brickgloria.

No kragle :-)! I used ball-joint elements and the placement keeps the upper wings firmly attached and in position. Weighted stand and angled to angle the lower wings and help with stability. Colored to resemble a war mask. Last photo for size

LSS Castor has arrived at the belt and the phase II expansion of the station has completed!  Additional renders are available at https://github.com/mark-macbeth/lego/blob/main/vignettes/es-10a/README.md

I originally built the small ship early this year as a part of the mini space build IDEAS challenge. I decided to scale it up because I thought the design was really fun.

How the ship works.

Exotic matter is store in the green tanks along the curved arm. The matter powers many of the functions on the ship and goes down the primary shaft and then horizontally through the ship. It goes through the clear cockpit which is actually a small tower stacker sideways, and ejects spent fuel from the front. Out of the back, the dark blue is the exotic matter being expelled to push the ship forward.

On the bottom is a turret that can rotate any angle. In the middle of the ship are clear pieces which indicate the primary living quarters.

These are long-range multi-generational transports and are not designed for any terrestrial landings. Instead the will dock along spaceports, of which the heavy cruiser would dwarf, for supplies.