the best of nnenn

Tragically, the reclusive builder known only as nnenn to most of his was killed in a car crash earlier this month (see this post on The Brother's Brick). The guys over at TBB are paying their respects to him by blogging their favorite creations of his, so I thought that it'd be the least I could do to blog a couple of my favorite of his military-themed creations.

His F-16 Fighting Falcon is always what comes to mind when I think of nnenn's work in the military theme. His tendency to build sleek and studless aircraft and spacecraft never failed to impress.

Of equal note is his near-future derivative of the Eurofighter Typhoon, which was his last military-themed creation. It's quite possibly his best, as well, considering the many intricate details that he managed to incorporate into the creation while still keeping it very clean in appearance.

F-16 Fighting Falcon

A very detail-oriented builder, Mike Psiaki has been tweaking his F-16 Fighting Falcon for some time now. Though it's still a work in progress, I think it's safe to say that it's sufficiently developed to blog here. The new canopy from the Atlantis sets works perfectly for the cockpit, and the neon green works remarkably well, as fighter cockpits often have green glows to them from their heads-up displays. Otherwise, there are lots of interesting angles that doubtlessly have been achieved by only by very intricate SNOT work, but the payoff is that the model resembles its real-life counterpart down to every last angle. It's easily one of the best models that I've seen lately, and is all the more cool to see as the F-16 is my favorite fighter.

LEGO Military Build Challenge #3: Rescue!

As usual at the end of a build challenge, I bring you my own overview of the various submitted models. It's a bit shorter than the previous two, quite simply because we had fewer entries. I'm hoping this means that everybody had plenty of ideas of their own rather than that we've chosen a poor subject.

It certainly got creative juices flowing with cm946. His entry for this challenge is probably also the most imaginative or weirdest depending on your point of view. I won't make any statements either way, it is called the Monkey Search and Reskewer, and according to the background story (for which you need to click the picture) was used to 'fend off abnormally large Sharks, of both the Sky and Sea varieties'.

Actually, I will make a statement: dude, I don't know what you've been sniffing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's illegal (only joking).

I wasn't sniffing anything other than a sea breeze when I got the idea for my own entry. In the last few months I took two trips to Den Helder in the North of The Netherlands, visiting the Royal Netherlands Naval College. Den Helder is the home base for the Dutch Navy's SH-14D Lynx helicopters, and that's what I decided to build.

One of their missions is Search-and-Rescue over the North Sea.

Necessity is the mother of invention. What do you do if a) your troops desperately need food or ammo and b) you don't ave any dedicated cargo aircraft or helicopters? Brickgeek's solution is the Osprey 1, a crop duster turned into a multi-purpose support aircraft.



Some of us may still be building HumVees, but my fellow blogger Chandler Parker is already looking forward to the HumVee's successor: the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, building an ambulance version.

Among other goodies it has working suspension and a cleverly constructed windscreen. It's also hard to beat the effective simplicity of a brick-built red cross logo.

For this challenge, Imagelego came up with a type of vehicle that I am sure neither Chandler or I thought of when we started the challenge -a recover tank. However, it's very fitting nonetheless and a very nice build. He builds tanks on a somewhat smaller scale than most military builders, but manages to make them more detailed than many larger vehicles I've seen over the years.

Good stuff. I'm hoping we'll get a few entries of this level for the combat engineering category of this year's build contest, although they'll make my task as a judge a bit harder.

We may not have had many entries this time around, but the very prolific Aleksander Stein apparently felt that he could make up for that just on his own by building multiple entries. The first is a wrecker version of a military truck.

I think this is the sort of vehicle that is often overlooked by LEGO military builders -part of the reason for the combat engineering category in the contest. Their utilitarian looks doesn't make them pretty, but Aleksander's truck definitely looks the part.
Like the US Military's HumVee, Aleksander's Dragoon vehicle comes in a whole variety of different versions. His second entry is an armoured ambulance version.

To top it all off, he's combined both vehicles in an action-packed diorama.

Awesome.

The American truck manufacturer Oshkosh is mostly known for builsing the HEMTT heavy tactical trucks for the US military as well as specialised vehicles for fire fighting and the construction industry. Bruno Vaiano's entry is a combination of both: the TFFT is an airport fire tender based on the HEMTT truck chassis.

Bruno reckons it is his best military MOC to date and I am inclined to agree.

From my own entry I hope it is obvious that I like helicopters, I'm very happy that we had a three helicopters as last-minute entries. Ninja Pilot's helicopter is called the SS 40 Griffin.

I love the colour scheme (reminiscent of the colours used by the Canadian Armed Forces) and the working doors in particular -no small feat on a minifig scale helicopter.

Babalas Shipyards took some time out from building his massiveWW II Fletcher class destroyer to build the RH-21 Black Swan, also built to minifig scale and featuring working sliding doors as well as a retractable undercarriage.


The final entry of this challenge is a model of the classic UH-60 Blackhawk byGravel Cruncher, a helicopter type that is also used for missions such as Combat Search and Rescue.

Many other people have built Black Hawks, but what is special about this one is how many minifigs it can fit in spite of its modest size.

In numbers this may not have been our most successful challenge, but we did get some nice entries out of it and I'd like to thank everybody who did go to the trouble of building something. Chandler and I will be announcing a next challenge after the current build competition ends.

Attention all builders

M6 Crusader, now with instructions!

More than a Year ago fellow LEGO builder Robin Chang, (aka. GreenLead) started a project called Alpha Company, a community of military builders all working together in the same fictional military unit. As part of this he started looking for military builders who could help out with designs for the various pieces of equipment for Alpha Company and their opponents (the FRC for short).

I agreed to design a truck and loosely based it on the US Army's Palletized Load System, which Robin decided to name the M6 Crusader. The idea was to have a standardised container design so that the same basic truck could be used for a number of different missions. The various builders participating in the project could design their own payloads.

Robin was very busy doing other things for a while, such as making instructions for the FRC's Ravager Jeep, designed by Aleksander Stein
( which we blogged a while ago), but after that he turned his attention back to the Crusader. We agreed to a redesign.

It carries a bigger load, is shorter overall, has new camouflage (dark green, reddish brown and dark blueish grey) and looks a lot more serious somehow.

After a lot of hard work, Robin has now finished the instructions for this model as well.

You can download them from the Alpha Company website. I think Robin has done a great job making the instructions for this. They are very clear and look very professional. In the process he also designed an alternative payload module, where the 'payload' consists of passengers. It too is included in the instructions.


I suspect that pretty soon Alpha Company will be launching a competition for their users to design their own modules. I already look forward to it.

A fist full of Hummers

It has been a while since I last wrote a post. Suffice to say I've been busy (building, and travelling). Furthermore there simply weren't all that many military MOCs in the last few weeks that tickled my fancy, apart from the ones Chandler already blogged.
That I am writing this post now is due to me seeing a very nice representation of a LEGO HMMWV built by legohaulic this morning. One could argue that the 'terrorist' being crushed by the model is a tad distasteful, but I like the vehicle. The grille is nice, I like that it has working suspension and I love the use of curved bricks to build the lip of the hatch in the back. They are small details, but add a lot to the model.

Legohaulic remarks:"I know that there are many LEGO versions of the HUMVEE out there that are almost identical." With many builders having tried their hand at building Hummers, it has become hard to build one that is obviously different, apart from changing the scale. Because of Legohaulic's model I decided to trawl flickr and brickshelf looking for Hummers and Humvees. There are a lot of models of civilian Hummers out there as well, but since this is a blog about military LEGO I'll focus on the military versions.

The HMMWV for High Mobility Military Wheeled Vehicle, known to troops as the HumVee, was designed in the late 'seventies as early 'eighties as a replacement for a range of different vehicles in use with the US Army. This included various development of the classic Jeep, but also a number of different light trucks and a wonderfully weird six-wheeled contraption known as the Gama Goat (I don't think I've seen one of those yet in LEGO). The vehicle was to have an exceptional ability to drive off-road and replacing light trucks meant that the vehicle was going to be considerably bigger than a Jeep. I doubt anybody would call the result pretty, but the trucks did the job. The US Army uses thousands of HumVees in a bewildering variety of types including fairly basic pick-up trucks, versions armed with anti-tank or surface-to-air missiles, long range patrol vehicles for special forces and ambulances. During the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan vehicles such as HumVees have proven very vulnerable to mines, improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades, leading to efforts to add more armour but also to finding replacement vehicles. Regardless, I think we can expect HumVees to remain in service for a long time still and to see many people try to build LEGO versions.

I think that Mike Yoder has influenced a lot of other builders with his 8-wide Hummer.

Some of the people who commented on Legohaulic's HumVee that there are a lot of people who seem to copy what other people have done. This seems to be the case for 8-stud-wide models in particular. I'm not going to post all the other 8-wide HumVees that I came across that were obviously inspired by Mike Yoder's, but they are numerous. Instead I'm going to focus on other 8-wide models that do manage to be different (and not suck while doing it).

Like LegoHaulic's HumVee, the 8-wide model by urthedead has working suspension.


Brickshelf user sfzdk also has an 8-wide model, which manages to be different once again.

(edit: I replaced a picture with a thumbnail, because the original is too large. Clicking the picture takes you to the brickshelf folder.)


Mike Psiaki acknowledges Mr Yoder's influence (and it is obvious in the construction of the chassis), but manages to give it his own twist by choosing to use aircraft windows that make it look much more like an up-armoured Heavy Hummer.

Obviously if you have different but roughly similarly skilled builders take on a similar subject, you'll end up with similar results. These models are all variations on a theme, perhaps, but you can see that much of the construction of these vehicles is very different, and yet they manage to look similar. Isn't LEGO wonderful? There are so many different ways of achieving a similar effect!

Now I'm going to turn towards different scales and I'll start with a tiny little model built by brickmania

It is only four studs wide, but it still manages to capture all the salient details.

For those of you who follow this blog or with whom I've discussed the issue on eurobricks (ad nauseam) it will be no surprise that I tend to opt for the smaller end of minifig scale. I think that 8 studs wide is a bit to much for a HumVee. The real vehicles are wide, without a doubt, but part of how wide they look is caused by the fact that the cab is fairly low and sits high above fairly chunky wheels. When I tried my hand at a minifig scale HumVee, I opted for six studs wide.

Unfortunately, in order to be able to fit at least a driver in there, it ended up with a cab that looks too tall.

Using my design as a starting point, channaher built his own six-wide HumVee and by using a few tricks (a plate here and there and some door rails) he managed to make it look much better.


Moving on towards a larger scale, for a long time I've been building cars to the slightly unusual scale of 1/22 (although I am pleased to see that it seems to be catching on!). On that scale HumVees end up being 12 studs wide.

To me the old-school technic tyres I used seemed made for this vehicle.

Showing that size matters, rabidnovaracer built a whopping 34-stud wide monster:


I am sure that there are some worthy and original models of LEGO Hummers out there that I overlooked (if you know some, please leave a comment), but I hope I have given you a nice overview of the various ways in which LEGO builders can make a box on wheels look interesting.

Black Arrow and Shrike B

Magnus Lauglo, a rather prolific builder as of late, has been focusing on building aircraft for the past few months, and has added two new creations to his ever growing collection of vehicles. The Shrike B (an upgrade of the earlier Shrike) is a multirole fighter that is reminiscent of real-life trainers, and the Black Arrow is a sleek stealth UAV that's supposed to be a technology demostrator.