LEGO Space Designs by David A. Karr

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Five-seat cabin cruiser

In November, 1994, I put together a small cabin spacecraft. The craft has an actual cabin with seating for five minifigures; alternatively, you could remove a couple of seats and seat three minifigures comfortably with room left over for equipment. As it turns out, the lines of this ship bear some similarities to those of the old LL924 and LL928 (see the discussion and photos in the MSL LEGO Division), mainly in combining two wing plates on each side to create a single sharply swept-back wing, but I didn't know this at the time. (I had, however, seen a similar idea in jet-fighter models by other enthusiasts.)

The top of the cabin opens up on a hinge to allow fingers to access the inside; the minifigures, however, are supposed to enter and exit through a door in the rear. In December 1994, My 3-year-old and 5-year-old daughters used this as an exploratory vessel with a crew of three; it dives underwater (like the Magic School Bus) so that the scientist and her helper can swim outside while the pilot waits inside. Drawbacks were that the interior is a bit cramped for the manipulative powers of a 3-year-old, and the various non-structural doodads I stuck on the outside (to make the ship look mean) tend to fall off under rough handling. Also, there was some squabbling over who got to be the pilot, which the girls finally settled by installing a dual console up front and squeezing two pilots in there.

Aside from some pieces from a small M-Tron set (mainly the bow plate and wings), the craft is mostly Basic pieces with a few Town parts thrown in. Its weakest point, aesthetically, may be the rear door, which is one of those homey yellow things with windows that come in Basic sets. My wife's comment was that the door seemed to demand some window planters with flowers on either side. Unfortunately, I just don't have a cool-looking door that would fit this spacecraft. Probably the best solution is to acquire some suitable hinges and make one (I was very impressed by the swing-out rear sections of the LL924 and LL928).

Basic rocket

In 1994 I received a free set of 27 Basic pieces from LEGO in return for sending in one of those survey cards from a set we bought. The first thing I made with them was an unmanned rocket (10K JPEG image). Or maybe it's a hat stand. You really have to use your imagination when viewing some of these very Basic models.

Last updated Mon Sep 29 00:57:17 EDT 2003 .

From David A. Karr's LEGO Collection, by David A. Karr