The Battlestar Display

At long last, I present the Battlestar Display that ChiefLUG put on at BrickCon 2008 in Seattle last weekend!



Overview shots
Details!

Some shots of the display:

Katie's mosaic!












Don's AWESOME video of the display (and a Viper flyby!)

And we won BEST IN SPACE!


The whole thing turned out way better than I imagined, and I'm sad that the weekend flew by so fast. A massive thanks to everyone who brought a Viper, a Raptor, a Raider, a Colonial Movers (there's 3 of you!), hangar space, figures, or a mosaic (love you honey!) We had 35 smaller vehicles all told, many more than I imagined when I first put out my announcement about the ChiefLUG initiation.

I don't know if we can top it, but there will certainly be more big ChiefLUG projects in the future, and you haven't seen the last of my hangar.

Post-Con Wrapup coming soon!

I'm nearly finished uploading and organizing all the BrickCon photos from this past weekend, and am preparing a post detailing the BSG display we put on. It was epic in every sense of the word, and it will never happen again.

A teaser:

HANGAR FILLED

We did it! With just the folks attending today's supermegaawesomerad ChiefLUG meeting, we filled the entire hangar!


Sure, the hangar's not finished, and a couple of these models are incomplete, but we filled every stall, and had crew and techy bits strewn throughout. Fradel and Gary's Vipers were brand new to me, and looked great, as did Scotty's WIP Heavy Raider, if a bit underscaled. Bram's models were also really well done.

ChiefLUG members new and old were in attendance, and I think everyone had a great time. It was an excellent test run of what should be a really rad display at BrickCon.

See more pics of the fun here.

Hangar Update

This 7 and a half foot slice of ridiculous is taking up a nice chunk of floor in our living room. It's come a long way since my last post, but still not even close to being finished.

Floor

Baseplates arrived yesterday. I had bought extras, but then decided there needed to be more floorspace (for tools and crew and stuff,) and used the extra plates to widen the hangar. Now I need to buy more...

Oh, and Andrew brought his newest Viper and Raptor over, and I got mine back from Fradel, who was borrowing it to make his own. We also built a bunch of figs based on characters from the show.

Another

What about this one?

Hangar Started

I finally started the Hangar today for the BSG Display:


Not much to show, just testing out an idea for the stripey columns. Still not sure what to do for the floor, but leaning towards baseplates with tiles on top.

Regardless, I think I'll be spending way more on this project on Bricklink than anything I've ever done before, because if I go with this technique, I'll need lots of slopes and their inverses, and TONS of jumper plates.

ChiefLUG Initiation Announced

Today I announced the ChiefLUG Initiation here on Classic-Space.com, with an additional mention on Flickr.

What's going on? Why am I doing this? This all basically happened because you know how much I love Andrew's Viper


click here for the full Brickshelf gallery

I decided, after a brief conversation with Andrew about it, that there should be a Battlestar display at BrickCon, and that ChiefLUG should be behind it. There's a ton of BSG fans among the Lego spacer community, and a love for all things Colonial and Cylon in geek culture at large. I imagined rows of custom Vipers all lined up, with the Colonial Anthem blaring from a radio nearby.

By making the Viper build the requirement to enter ChiefLUG, I think we'll not only get a lot more members in our pseudo-KeithLUG, but we'll also be able to easily fill some kind of BSG display at the Con.

And the more I think about this display, the crazier I get. Why just throw Vipers down on a table? They need something equally nice to sit on. What about the hangar? I've thought about building the hangar ever since I first started watching BSG and people called me Chief. But I never felt up to the task. And surely a hangar big enough to hold a few Vipers would be much too big for my collection. But... putting them just on tables? No dude, we need the hangar. Well allright, let's see if I can pull this off. (See? Talking to myself: crazy!)


I'll be looking into brickbuilt versus baseplate floors, and start crunching some numbers to see how big it should be. Check back for updates later!