'Fire support' challenge round up

In the last two months the flickr military group has been running it's second challenge, titled 'Fire Support'. Obviously you can look at the discussion on the group, but as I did last time I've listed the entries here and give my opinion and some background info.

Erogwin was the first to come to the troops' rescue with his F36B Gryphon

According to his description is a heavy fighter used for close air support. At first this struck me as a somewhat unusual combination. Then again, the USAF nowadays even uses B-52 bombers for close-air-support, so why not?


A more traditional entry is the MA-(L) 'Sifter', by Mdrn-mrvls, a towed artillery piece

He built more than just the gun, it's part of a nice little diorama and I can only recommend that you check out the full photset to appreciate all the details.

Magnus Lauglo entered the fray with his Forktail attack aircraft seemingly inspired by jets such as the A-10 Thunderbolt II. Like the A-10, which is more popularly as the 'Warthog', Magnus' jet also has a nickname:'Killer Duck'. Some of the names you guys come up with are at least as creative as the models themselves.

The model has some lovely angles, in particular on the tail and in the way the cockpit canopy has been built. Magnus has taken a whole
series of pictures showing it from different angles.

Wiseman_Lego chose to go for a helicopter, the suitable chunky looking 'Nh-95 Plus' Special operations gunship. In common with real-life special ops helicopters it has some weird-protruberances fitted to the nose. However, I don't think I've ever seen a special ops. helciopter packing quite this much heat.

There's no kill like overkill!

It's rare to see something built by Greenlead and his entry, the Non-Line-Of-Sight Launch System had me puzzled. Fortunately he provided a handy link to a wikipedia page giving details of a similar system designed for the real world. It's a modular missile launcher that can be mounted on just about any vehicle or ship.

Greenlead has made instructions for this design and using those
Mickomaley has recreated the model in the brick.




I personally am not familiar with Warhammer (other than knowing of its existence), so I cannot vouch for the accuracy of cm946's Vendetta gunship from the Warhammer40k universe. Apparently it's a transport but with enough fire-power to support the troops it carries.



Robbyem has built something that can best be described as a low-rider half-track (albeit without tracks). It's a somewhat odd but futuristic looking combination and the effect of a missile being launched using a large transparent orange flame part looks cool (or should that be hot?).



The next entry was rather more conventional. Pmjredsox's U-902 Ferret is a helicopter reminiscent of the US Army's AH-1 HueyCobra attack helicopters and that's a good thing as far as I am concerned. Sadly there's only a single picture. I wouldn't have minded seeing other angles as well.


Pdragon> has built a vehicle, the One-Winged Angel with -as the name suggests- a very unusual configuration. I gave him a hard time about how real-world flying craft are usually largely symmetric (there have been a few assymetric aircraft in history, but they were never a success).

Still, it's nicely constructed.

One of the things that came to my mind with 'Fire Support' was mortars. So far we've seen a fair few really high-tech entries, but in practice lowly mortars are still in wide-spread use. Their lighter weight compared to proper artillery means that they can be carried by infantry units, although it's not uncommon for them to be transported using a vehicle such as the one built by legosim
M9982-FS 80mm Mortar Carrier


Rossart12 has gone for a classic, the Rockwell OV-10 Bronco. The real aircraft was designed specifically as a light attack/ counter-insurgency aircraft and saw operational service with the US Military from Vietnam through to the Gulf War of 1991. It's still in military operational service elsewhere in the world and in the US still fights battles of a very different nature: it is used as a spotter aircraft for fighting forest fires.

Ross' model has such goodies as a retractable undercarriage and moveable control surfaces. Spot on!

For this challenge Vaiano has produced two truly excellent entries. 'To Carlie with Love' is a version of a WW-II vintage M3 half track modified with a turret with four M2 Browning machine guns. Vehicles like this were used during the Korean War for defence against enemy aircraft. In practice the firepower also came in handy against ground targets and if Vaiano is to be believed these trucks were still in use in Vietnam.
Halftrack guntruck

His second entry is a hill-top fire base.

If customised minifigs are your thing, I suggest you to take a closer look at this.

Snuffwuzz >.< has defied the limitations of Lego Digital Designer to produce two CAD-models of real-life artillery used by the British Army. The first is an AS90 Self Propelled Gun

The second model is the one I like best. It represents an M270 multiple-launch rocket system, also known as the 'Grid Square Removal System'.


edit: Apparently my wish was granted before I even expressed it. Check out the brick-built Challenger.

My own entry is a model of a US Army HumVee modified for use by special forces.

Vehicles like this were used in the 2003 invasion of Iraq to penetrate deep behind enemy lines.

Brickgeek27 has what he himself calls a 'cute entry'. I'm not sure whether cute and military mix very well, but I'll leave you to decide. I myself quite like the minifig.


I could blabber on about the next entry. Aleksander_se has built the massive Koalitsjia "Blackbear" Self-Propelled Artillery piece. As usual with Aleks' builds it isn't based on a particular real-world piece of armour, but it looks as though it was.

It's full of amazing details, as usual. Check out the interior, for instance.

edit: as usual reality is stranger than fiction. Imagelego informed me that it is actually based on a real vehicle!

Fellow Dutchman Wouwie13 found some inspiration in my own model of a Predator UAV and built a very convincing model of the latest development, the ominously named MQ-9 Reaper.

Experiments with armed unmanned aircraft were done as long ago as WW-II, but it's in the recent war on terrorism that they have first seen widespread service.

DarthNick has entered two versions of basically the same vehicle, which he calls the Coyote. The first version is armed with two surface-to-air missiles.

the second version carriers surface-to-surface missiles.

It's a nice little vehicle, but I can't help wondering whether the crew wouldn't be burned to a crisp by missiles launching right over the tops of their heads. Ouch!

Brickmonkey presented an LDRAW version of his AH-6 Little Bird attack helicopter. This type of helicopter is used by the US Army's Special Operations Aviation Regiment 'Nightstalkers' to support troops like Delta Force or the US Army rangers. Perhaps you've seen them in action in Black Hawk down. Due to bricklink orders not arriving in time he was late posting the pictures of the brick-built version, but since I prefer real bricks over virtual ones I decided to put pictures of the real model in this write-up.
BrickMonkey


John Lamarck was another builder somewhat late to the party due to Bricklink orders not arriving, but the model was well worth the wait. John presents his Mil Mi-31 "ЛАСКА" (Russian for Weasel) as a near-future replacement for the current Ka-50 'Hokum'. Some of you may find Megabloks offensive, but this mix with proper LEGO works well and I have to admit that they apparently make some parts that I wouldn't mind LEGO making.


edit: I got fiction and reality a bit mixed up here. John actually presents his Mi-31 as a replacement for the Mi-28.

We haven't had as many entries as last time, but some really nice models came out of it nonetheless and I'll take quality over quantity any day. It'll be a while before we do another challenge quite like this, because next up we'll have a challenge that'll be a bit more specific. An announcement will follow shortly.

fire for effect

Magnus Lauglo and Aleksander Stein, both regulars on this blog, have built two very different but both mind-blowing awesome creations for the LEGO Military Build Challenge: Fire Support.

Magnus has built an as-of-yet unnamed (Magnus is accepting suggestions for names here) multirole fighter (multirole fighters are capable of ground attack, and thus are fall into the category of fire support) inspired by real-life multirole fighters such as the American F-16 Fighting Falcon and F-35 Lightning II, and the Swedish JAS-39 Gripen. While aesthetically it's quite reminiscent of the Gripen and sports a camo scheme that reminds me of the Gripen's predecessor, the Viggen, it incorporates a VTOL system that's very similar to that of the Lightning II. To fully appreciate the amount of detail and working features that Magnus has packed into the relatively small fighter, I encourage you to browse its photo set on flickr.

Aleks, on the other hand, opted to build a self-propelled howitzer inspired by the prototype Koalitsiya-SV, an artillery piece based upon the Msta-S, the primary self-propelled howitzer of the Russian military. As always, he has managed to fuse a piece of real-life hardware and an impressive, techobabble-laced writeup into a very believable finished product. His attention to detail really shows through on this model, so be sure to browse the photo set for the creation on flickr.

Smooth operator

Steven Marshall -already known by LEGO lovers worldwide as the builder of amazingly realistic studless models and crisp photography- turns his attention to a new topic: a military helicopter.

The model represents the Ka-50 Black Shark (known to NATO as the Hokum). It is an amazingly detailed model that stands out not just because of being studless, but also because of the smoothness of all the shapes. It is not immediately clear from the picture, but this is actually a render. Steven has already announced that he is also building the model in real bricks and I already look forward to seeing it. Excellent work.

Building camouflage

I would like this blog to be about more than just nice military MOCs we spot on the internet, so every once in a while I'll bore you with something a bit more 'editorial'. This time I'd like to share my thoughts and some tips and tricks on building convincing camouflage for LEGO vehicles, helicopters and aircraft.

What is camouflage?
According to the free dictionary camouflage is:

The method or result of concealing personnel or equipment from an enemy by making them appear to be part of the natural surroundings.

There are two main ways in which this is done: by giving it a colour or colours that match those of the surroundings and by using those colours such that its contours are obscured. Examples of the former are painting a tank that is used in a desert in tan or painting an air superiority fighter in a more-or-less uniform grey. For LEGO building this is fairly easy, although it may be hard to find all the parts you need in a single colour! However, if the surroundings have multiple different colours or you expect to use your vehicle in different surroundings, painting a vehicle in a single uniform colour may not be the most effective. A forest, for instance, tends to have different greens and browns that are lighter and darker depending on how dense the foliage is in any given spot. Having a uniformly green APC standing in front of it might make it stand out rather than blend in, because of the straight lines that form its edges and a general absence of straight edges in a real forest. The various coloured patches on the vehicle should obscure the vehicle's contours. Check out these pictures of real-world camouflage.

A US Marine corps AAV-7 amphibious tractor

A US Navy F/A-18C Hornet painted to represent a Russian Su-27 'Flanker'

An actual Russian Su-27 'Flanker'

Camouflage is not random
Recreating this effect in a LEGO model might seem easy. After all, building something in lots of colours has the wonderful advantage that if you don't have a particular part in one colour, you can easily use another. However, simply taking a few piles of parts in a number of colours and picking the parts you need at random isn't going to produce a very convincing result. You see, camouflage isn't random. In order to have a vehicle blend into the background, different colours are used in a few fairly large patches rather than in lots of small ones. The size of the patches and how jagged the demarcations between the colours are have to be matched to what the background looks like from a range of distances. In the real world this is increasingly done using mathematics, (fractal geometry in particular), but that may be a bridge too far for the purpose of this blog post. So, how can you build multi-coloured camouflage in LEGO?

Limit the number of colours to four at most
The first step in recreating this sort of effect in LEGO is choosing the colours. Back when I was a child, LEGO used to come in black, white, grey, red, yellow and blue -not enough for decent camouflage. The range of colours in which LEGO makes parts has been greatly expanded, but there still aren't all that many colours that work well for a realistic colour scheme. In my opinion, a convincing camouflage scheme shouldn't have more than three or four different colours. Of course, if you are modelling a real vehicle, your colours are determined by those of the real vehicle. Regular green is very bright. There is a decent collection of parts in sand green as well, but the colour does look quite pale. Brown and reddish brown are pretty good and there's a fairly wide range of tan parts available. Dark green is better, but you can only get a very limited range of parts. Dark tan is really nice, but still a bit limiting. Part availability in various greys and in black is very good. For aircraft models, colours such as medium blue and sand blue can also be handy, but they are also not easily available in large quantities.

Don't use colours that contrast too much
Most real-world camouflage schemes do not mix very light or pale colours with dark ones, simply because most background don't either. An exception would be snow camouflage, which sometimes mixes dark green and white.
Fairly pale colours such as tan, sand green and light grey go reasonably well together. Similarly, black, dark green, brown and dark grey go well together. Leave out the dark grey and you've got something very close to a standard vehicle camouflage scheme on the AAV-7 above.

The second step is creating the patches. As I mentioned before, the demarcation lines between different camouflage colours tend to not be straight lines. Of course, LEGO is full of straight lines, but we can break them by applying two simple guidelines (important enough for me to make them stand out a bit):

1)The border between colours should never be a straight line of more than 3 or 4 studs long before it changes direction.
2)once a demarcation line has changed direction once, it should change again at the next stud.


If you don't follow the latter your patches will end up looking far too rectangular. I pondered making a drawing to show this, but have instead decided to show it using a picture of a model I built for the Alpha Company Forums.

Demarcation lines between different colour should typically not be straight for more than 3 or 4 bricks.

If you look at the demarcation lines between the colours on the side of the container the vehicle carries, you'll see that they follow the two rules above. There is one obvious exception: the long straight line at the bottom, and it stands out like a sore thumb! This is something I need to fix on a new version. These rules may all seem terribly complicated and they could get in the way of finding the right shape or using a particular part that works well in a particular spot. However, I have some practical advice to avoid this. What sometimes works for me is building the model without paying too much attention to the camouflage and then, when the rough form is done, simply swapping some colours around whilst applying the guidelines above. It doesn't have to require vast amounts of parts either.

As examples I'll show some more examples of other people's LEGO models that show what I think is convincing camouflage. Look closely and you'll see that the builders have generally applied the guidelines for the demarcations between the colours, quite possibly without being aware of them.

Tan and dark blueish grey on Brickmania's Tiger tank, with leaves added for extra effect.

Aleksander SE's "Prowler" Light Tank is a fictional but very convincing vehicle in dark green, dark grey and tan. The tan looks quite light compared to the other colours, but because there's not a whole lot of it looks fine.

Magnus Lauglo uses dark green, regular green and dark grey for his Griffin heavy lift helicopter. The green looks a bit lurid, but combined with the darker colours the scheme is convincing.

Lego Monster's huge Vulcan bomber has a few fairly long straight lines in the camouflage, but because it's such a huge model this doesn't distract at all. Also note the use of wedge plates to create diagonal lines.

Of course, this overview is far from complete. There are more techniques you can use, with slopes and wedge plates to make things smoother for instance (as on Lego Monster's Vulcan). Some real-world vehicles can have pretty odd-ball patterns. There is also a type of camouflage that is not so much aimed at making a vehicle or plane blend into the background, but that is instead aimed at making it harder for an enemy to spot how far away it is or in which direction it is pointing. An example of this is painting a false canopy under the cockpit of a jet, making the bottom look more like the top from a distance. This is a completely different ballgame. In any case hope that I've given you some ideas on how to make your camouflage convincing!

Happy building!

Stilzkin Igniz

While browsing the LEGO Military flickr group's photo pool today, I stumbled upon a technic scale tracked articulated vehicle by Peer "mahjqa" Kreuger. Already an exceptional creation to start with, it's motorized (see here to see it in action) and even features brick built treads of a mind-blowingly clever design. I can easily say that it's one of the best creations that I've seen in quite a while, and the outdoor photography just adds to the awesomeness.























And on top of that, for his incredible video he built a micro scale version of the same vehicle.

the longest day

I've been meaning to post this excellent D-Day diorama by Andrew Beecraft for quite some time now, but forgetfulness, a cold, and downright laziness have precluded it from being posted earlier, and Andrew himself beat me to it by blogging it on the Brothers Brick (see here). However, it's such a nice creation that I feel that it should be featured here regardless. The vehicles are well built, but the landscaping strikes me as particularly impressive. I especially I like the incorporation of good ol' TLG trees - after all, not everything has to be brick built by default.

It's a matter of scale

It's a regularly re-occurring topic of conversation on LEGO-related websites and forums: what constitutes minifig scale? Figures can add a lot to a creation and many military builders seem to enjoy finding the right figures and accessories to go with their models at least as much as building the actual models.

For a long time I wasn't a fan of minifigures and used to build most of my aircraft and helicopter models on a scale that, at least in my opinion, was too big (and since this is my blog after all, my opinion matters!). The trouble with minifigs is their cartoonish proportions, as nicely illustrated by a diagram made by the illustrious Tim Gould (aka. gambort).


The diagram shows how minifigures when built to different scales compare to a real human (Tim's own 'svelte' silhouette in this case). In short, minifigs are stubby fat people.

This post was prompted by a reasonably nice rendition of a Fairey Swordfish that I found on MOCpages, built by Eduardo Ariño, and I encourage you to take a look at the page for more pictures and to read some of the viewers' comments.





I'm no stranger to the Fairey Swordfish, as I built one little more than a year ago.

It seems obvious to me that Eduardo has taken a closer look at my model than he may be willing to admit, but the differences are more interesting than the similarities -most notably the scale. His model is about 50% bigger than mine (a 60 stud wingspan versus a 40 stud span on mine), which means that since my model was built to a scale of approximately 1/43, his is about 1/30. I cannot deny that the crew accommodation in my model looks a bit too cosy for comfort. However, mine does look good with the crew standing next to it.


So, is there an ideal minifig scale? I don't think so. While 1/30 is certainly pushing the boundaries, in some respects 1/43 is a bit small. It all depends on what you want to do with your model. If it should fit in a diorama or have figures standing next to it, the smaller end of the range might fit (1/60); do you want the crew to sit inside and do you perhaps want to have some fun adding interior details, the bigger end of the range (1/35) might be your thing.