The pinnacle of (Lego) naval engineering
June 5th, 2009 | Blogs Foreign navies Historical Ships Video | Posted by Phil Ewing
Brothers-Brick.com
This week includes the 67th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, rightly remembered as the apotheosis of the aircraft carrier, but less well remembered is that the Japanese and U.S. fleets fielded their battleships, too. Indeed, the largest battleship ever built, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Yamato, sailed as part of the Combined Fleet at Midway, although it saw no action in the battle.
The world’s biggest battleships — there were two, along with a sibling, Musashi — present a titanic challenge for model-builders, but one Japanese student met that task with what could be the greatest Lego model ever built: a 1/40 scale Yamato.
This thing is a beast: 22 feet long from stem to stern; a 3-foot beam; with a displacement of 330 pounds. It took more than six years to complete and includes more than 200,000 Lego blocks — all to form a ship in perfect proportion to the tiny, brave Lego-man sailors that make up its crew.
Check out this video of the ship under construction:
Now here’s a question: Could the Lego Yamato sink a Lego Iowa-class battleship (this one is the Mighty Mo) in ship-to-ship surface action? Could it sink an (as-yet unfinished) Lego Tirpitz? Let the battle begin in the comments.
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The Scoop Deck – A new queen of the Lego seas Says:
October 11th, 2010 at 2:57 pm[...] way back in the early days of Scoop Deck, we wondered whether any Lego model could ever rival this 1/40 scale version of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s super-battleship Yamato. Now, something has: An entire Lego [...]