20100227--The Dreaded Imperial Basement

Of course, I haven't just been building people since my last update in December. I have actually started the Death Star itself!

Days Four and Five:

So in this round I did what is essentially the Death Star's basement. Not much form the movie here, just a space filler to allow the Death Star to maintain its spherical shape. Still, we get some great Lego engineering even at this stage, and for what I thought from the pictures would be barely a crawlspace, we actually get we few nice details showing the designers didn't skimp completely on this phase. :)

First, the ground floor. A typical base plate isn't really an option here, so we get a roundish floor made up of three layers of plates:



Here's the finished floor, with some minifigures for scale. I didn't measure it, but I'd estimate it to be about 8 inches wide. The Death Star as a whole is supposed to be about 16" wide and tall, which doesn't sound like a lot, but trust me, it's huge as Lego sets go. The minifigures are only 1 3/4" tall on average, after all.



Next they had me put these round beige pieces on the bottom of the floor. In addition to adding to the structural integrity of the floor itself, these smooth, rounded pieces will also make it easier to rotate the Death Star to get at the different sides.



Here's where I ended on Day 4. About halfway up the wall supports.



On day 5 I finished up the ground level. The next step would be to start building the first floor. As you can see, it's a full size level with four "rooms," just tall enough for a minifigure to stand upright in.



As I mentioned, the wacky Danes added a few details to this level to keep it interesting. As you'd expect in a basement, there are some random pipes:



And some storage containers:



Not much going on in this room, so here's another Stormtrooper:



Note the little lights on the walls in these rooms, too. The Lego design team could have really phoned in this part, but the went the extra mile, definitely.

The last room isn't really a room--it's actually the bottom part of the chasm that Luke and Leia swing across. Note the first labels were added, replicating the unique pill shaped windows that exist throughout the Death Star.



(After I took these pictures, it also occurred to me that this part serves another function, which I'll elaborate on next time with another photo.)

With the "walls" added the basement's span increases to about 12." It's a pretty good sized structure---but then I looked at how it compares to the rest of it!



What's worse, on the other sides where there's floor over it, you barely notice this space is there at all!

And that catches us up. Tomorrow I will start up the building process again and start work on the first floor, where Stuff Actually Happens. :)

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