LEGO Military Build Challenge #1: Arctic Warfare

Taken from the announcement in the LEGO Military Models flickr group:

"Hi all, we'd like to announce our first build challenge here at LMM, the theme of which is arctic warfare. As you may remember, Ralph started a thread about two weeks ago in which he tossed out a few ideas for the theme of this challenge for members to choose from, and you all chose arctic warfare. What's arctic warfare, you ask? Well, I'll let Wikipedia do the talking:

"Arctic warfare or winter warfare is a term used to describe armed conflict that takes place in an exceptionally cold weather, usually in snowy and icy terrain, sometimes on ice-covered bodies of water. One must note the distinction between alpine and arctic warfare - arctic war does not always take place in mountainous terrain, and mountain warfare does not always take place in the cold."

So, we'd like you all to build anything that has to do with arctic warfare, whether it be vehicles, dioramas, or vignettes. Potential sources of inspiration include the Eastern Fronts of both world wars, as well as more recent conflicts such as the Falklands War and the still-ongoing Kashmir conflict. Or you might want to build an alternate history conflict, such as the Cold War gone hot, with battles in such places as the Nordic countries, Russia, or even Alaska. Or maybe you'd like to build something completely fictional. It's entirely up to you!

You have until September 31st to post you creations in the entry thread. If you have any questions, feel free to contact any staff member, or just ask in this thread. Just to clarify, this build challenge is just for fun, and there aren't any prizes involved. Now get building!"

Can I have instructions? (part 2)

A few weeks ago I posted a link to instructions for two of the aircraft I have been building for Project Intrepid.


In the last week or so, I have been making instructions for the third, the F6F Hellcat. I found the whole process much easier than the first two times around, but it still took about ten hours. The model has 626 parts and the instructions have 32 pages. As with the other instructions, I'm releasing these under creative commons, attribute, non commercial, no derivative license. These aren't for commercial use!

You can download the file by clicking the picture below.


I'd really appreciate getting feedback by people who download these and (possibly) build their own versions.

Happy building!

Huey

Some machines change the very nature of warfare. After experiments towards the end of WW-II and operational use in Korea, the helicopter came of age during the long and arduous conflict in South-East Asia, when the US Army used large numbers of helicopters in air-mobile operations. One of the machines that made this possible was the Bell 205, better known as the 'Huey', one of the world's first turbine powered helicopters. Variants of the Huey are still in service all over the world and Heuys are still being built today.

I myself took a shot at building one a few years ago.

It is a twin-engined HH-1N, a model that until recently was used by the US Navy for Search-And-Rescue missions. I was (and still am) quite happy with how it turned out, but one of the things that I never liked was how the sliding doors on the cabin don't follow the contours of the fuselage when open. Looking at my pictures right now, I find none that illustrate this clearly. This is probably no coincidence!

This week the ever-innovative Mike Psiaki posted pictures of his own new model of a Huey. His older model was already more than decent, but the new one tops it. It's full of great techniques, it's small enough to look good with minifigs and he's come up with a pretty radical way to make the doors work, solving the problem I couldn't a few years ago.

I don't normally say this sort of thing, but this has to be the best LEGO Huey model ever. Great work.

Treating the wounded in Normandy

I don't normally refer to other blogs when writing here, but in the last few weeks I've been reading a series of articles that I found particularly interesting and that I felt like sharing. Andrew Becraft (aka. Dunechaser) is new to the military scene, but hardly a stranger to the on-line AFOL scene as one of the regular contributors to The Brothers Brick. His latest creation is a WW-II Battalion aid station.



In a series of posts on The Brothers Brick about his recent project Andrew revealed that that recently he has become more interested in building models and that as with many people from our generation, his grandfather fought in WW-II. This combination lead him to this project.

In a post about the vehicles Andrew describes some of the planning and his thoughts on scale. In his second post he describes the whole diorama. In a final post he describes his planning process and the role feedback from other community members played in the project. If you like the sort things I've been writing here his posts are definitely well worth reading.

The whole diorama is impressive and so is the effort that went into the individual vehicles. I'm already looking forward to what he'll build next.

LEGO Military Models' own flickr group

When I started this blog, I toyed with the idea of associating it with its own group on flickr, but I never got around to it.



A number of recent developments have caused to me revisit this idea and to start a new group, obviously called LEGO Military Models, or LMM for short. Magnus Lauglo has joined Chandler and me as a fellow admin and Jas Nagra has agreed to become moderator. The new group is dedicated to LEGO models of military vehicles or equipment and dioramas and vignettes, from roughly WW-I to near-future military. This can include fictional MOCs. In order to keep the quality up, picture content will be moderated. We hope that this appeals to many of you, and invite you to join us.

To start with, we will be running a new build challenge this summer. Head over to Lego Military Models on flickr to discuss what it'll be about.