By David Wharton | 6 years ago

It seems to me that there are two types of Lego fans. There are the ones who dump all the pieces into a pile and start snapping them together without any specific end goal in mind, just letting their imagination take them wherever. Or there are the folks who look at that same pile and envision them assembled into a specific form. Say, for instance, the titular space station from sci-fi classic Babylon 5. That’s obviously how one Lego maniac’s brain works, because he spent seven months constructing a Lego replica of our last, best hope for peace.

Eurobricks user Mario Sánchez shared pictures of his months-long project almost a year ago exactly, so I must admit I’m curious what he’s been up in the ensuing time — a Lego Citadel maybe? (Okay, I had to check: he’s also built sets for Sherlock Holmes, the Council of Elrond from The Lord of the Rings, and others — admittedly, none as impressive as his B5.)

Here is his description and the model’s specs, for any of you viewing this not just as a cool bit of work, but as a challenge:

It has taken me 7 months to finish it. I started with LDD, changed the scale, changed again the scale, almost give up (twice, at least), finalized the design, bought pieces, discovered LDD does not take into account Gravity Law, redesigned the internal structure and the ‘tail,’ bought more pieces, made some minor changes and finally there it was, my own Babylon 5. It is 84 cm. long (33 inches) and it has of 2332 pieces (1904 of them are Plates, Tiles or Cheese Slopes and 270 are various types of Bricks 1×1).

Honestly, I’m tired just from reading that. Granted, my Lego experience these days is usually limited to swearing loudly after stepping on one of the blocks my kids left out in the middle of the night. At least with this, a tiny Lego Ivanova would threaten to launch a Starfury squadron if you entered their airspace.

For any who haven’t seen Babylon 5, it was centered on a station of the same name, a hub of travel, trade, and diplomacy which soon became a beacon of hope and resistance in at least two wars. Its construction makes use of that classic cylindrical station design that’s been used a ton in science fiction and proposed as the basis for real-world space colonies. The station spins, generating “gravity” of a force that’s near Earth normal, allowing the inhabitants to stroll around on the interior, glancing up at a horizon that rises and curves back above you. It makes for one hell of a view, as this actual NASA concept art for a proposed space colony shows.

That’s some nice work, Mario. Check out more shots of his B5 model below, and more of Mario’s work on his Flickr and Picasa pages.