I grew up building LEGO spaceships. LEGO Classic Space captured my imagination from a young age and only increased my interest in space exploration and science fiction. Even now, I still continue to create spaceships, and LEGO Space Projects: 52 Creative Models by Jeff Friesen piqued my curiosity about the neo future he creates with his LEGO exploration vehicles.
Friesen creates unique space vehicles in microscale with creative parts usage to keep his creations small and utilizing parts in interesting techniques to give them an innovative look. By keeping each build small, using anywhere from 8 to 100 pieces, each of the space vehicles keeps a minimalist touch while making each spaceship, mech, and rover have an individual appearance.
LEGO Space Projects: 52 Creative Models opens with several pages describing how just a few pieces can inspire the reader to create and imagine a spacecraft and how just three pieces could build a small shuttle. From there, Friesen goes into some of his favorite parts that he uses for spaceships and how they can be combined to constitute ships that look each have a completely different look and feel.
The 52 projects that constitute the rest of the book are organized in alphabetical order based on the name of the LEGO creation. While an index to find different or related builds would have been nice, it does allow the reader to explore the book and find the kind of LEGO building they want to do.
The directions for each LEGO creation as clear and easy to read. A list of all the necessary parts are at the top and clear photos of each step make it easy to understand what parts need to be added where and when.
Each creation has information about what it is and how it fits into the fictional universe that Friesen is creating. Information about how the spaceship or mech would work in this alternate reality have an informative paragraph that have a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tongue-in-cheek style while keeping an earnest imparting of knowledge. The flavor continues into the vehicle specs by listing who would be in the crew, the type of propulsion, special, and the manufacturer.
Anyone who loves spaceships and wants to learn to build them in a greeble style at microscale should pick up LEGO Space Projects: 52 Creative Models. It is a great resource for learning how to build big while building small spaceships.
