Caylin Feiring

Apart from the massive collaborative re-creation of "The Wizard of Oz," the recent Lego festival at Brickworld 2013 Chicago had plenty to gawk at.

Not least was an incredible Lego spaceship designed and built by Peter Mowry (aka Abathar). It's called The Marquis.

Tipping the scales at about 50 pounds with roughly 16,500 bricks and standing 56 inches tall, the arc-shaped vessel took eight months to build. It has an elaborate original backstory with highly detailed, inspired illustrations.

It's part of a fictional Hexan colonial fleet that features in a novel Mowry and friends are working on. As he describes them, the ships are truly enormous:

"The Hexans determined that large regions of the galactic cluster were rich in resources and devoid of life. The Home Council approved plans for the construction of an advanced colonization and resource-gathering fleet anchored by 120 superscale carriers built around a diamond design...

"They were large enough to house medium capital ships and hundreds of support craft. Their holds could be configured to store workers and colonists, raw materials or finished goods...

"Sightings of gargantuan, diamond-shaped ships are still reported, and in many instances, eyewitnesses describe them as outfitted with heavy armor and weapons batteries, supported by advanced warships and hundreds of fighters and strike craft."

The Marquis isn't quite as jaw-dropping as the 135-pound, 70,000-brick Serenity Lego spaceship we saw last year, but it wins points for a stunning original design.

It also won the Best Spacecraft Award at Brickworld Chicago.

Check out pics and design graphics of the insane Lego build of The Marquis in the gallery below, and visit Mowry's Flickr Photostream here.

(Via The Brothers Brick)