It took Charles 15 months and more than 500 hours to design and build his LEGO version of the iconic Imperial Star Destroyer, first imprinted on the collective consciousness when it crawled across the opening shot of Star Wars in 1977. Like the ship in the movie, Charles’s destroyer intimidates with its size. Weighing 20 kg, the creation boasts almost 20 000 LEGO bricks, three times as many as the biggest set LEGO has ever published (the 2017 Star Wars: Millennium Falcon set, priced at R16 000).
But it’s not the mass, weight, or obsessive detail that make Charles’s starship so remarkable. ‘There are definitely bigger and more impressive LEGO Star Destroyers out there,’ says Charles, 43, a senior technical animator in Raleigh, North Carolina. ‘I’ve seen one over 10 feet long.’ His construction is distinct because it’s custom, the first such LEGO model he’s ever built.
Charles credits his Star Destroyer to a digital revolution transforming LEGO fandom. Throughout LEGO’s 62-year history, diehards have always built wild, imaginative models from their plastic scrap heaps, but a new wave of fan-made digital resources has given builders the tools to craft custom models that rival the detail and integrity of official LEGO sets. Whether you’re looking for cutting-edge software to design your next project or a site that can generate a piece-by-piece instruction booklet, it’s likely out there, free for download.
THE DIGITAL TOOLBOX
Like most new LEGO projects, Charles’s ship materialised on a computer before he started clicking bricks together.
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