For the last week, an airplane hangar on the south shore of New York's Long Island was home to the world's largest Lego model. There, a team of Lego engineers readied an 11-foot-tall model of the X-wing starfighter from Star Wars for its debut today in New York's Times Square. After a three-day stint in the Big Apple, the model will move to Legoland California where it will reside for the remainder of the year.

Lego builders in the Czech Republic spent four months building the model, which is made of more than 5.3 million stock Lego bricks. Inside its Lego exterior is a complex steel framework, also constructed in the Czech Republic.

Lego engineers designed the spacecraft using the company's Brick Builder CAD program, which they used to map out the layers upon layers of pieces that would make up the 45,000-pound model.

Although the program gives a rough guide of where each brick should go, its up to the builders to figure out the order in which to place them.

To get the model to the U.S., the builders broke it into 34 pieces transported on two boats. Once stateside, they reassembled the finished starfighter in Islip, Long Island, where I climbed into its cockpit last week. Then the X-wing was deconstructed again—this time, into only three parts—and hauled last night on six flatbed trucks into New York, where cranes lifted it into position. The stunt is part of the run-up to The Yoda Chronicles, an animated three-part TV special that starts May 29.

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