Slashdot Mirror
The Star Wars Alphabet Project
An anonymous reader writes "A ship for every *other* letter in the alphabet. Jon Palmer is creating a Star Wars fighter out of LEGO for every letter in the alphabet (minus X,Y,B,A,E and V). He has about 5 to go. Check out the project on From Bricks to Bothans." I have to admit, some of these look even cooler than the ships created for the newer Star Wars movies.
How long before a font set will come out with the fighter characters? That would be quite nice!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Looks like he gave up without even trying on that one....
When you're 40, and all you do every day is build lego starwars ships... you really have to step back, and take a long hard look at your life.
Also, try this one.
The X-Wings, Y-Wings, A-Wings and B-Wings can be seen in the movies, so "official" designs exist already. The E-Wing is found in the comics, and I think the V-Wing is also somewhere in the expanded universe, so it exists in a "semi-official" way. So they designed ships for the rest of the alphabet.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
These are not the mindstorms you are looking for.. ..Move along
May the Source be with you
IIRC, the V Wing was in one of the computer games from Lucas Arts, "Rogue Squadron", and also cropped up in some of the books as well. One quick Google later and it would appear that there are also K-Wings, T-Wings and W-Wings already as well according to this page.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
...this!
Sorry for acting like an old fart, but wasn't Lego more fun when there was a limited number of different pieces in a limited number of colors? Nowadays, the sets consist of like three large custom-made painted pieces that you put together in ten seconds. The point of Lego is that you can build anything from a few simple parts.
Sadly enough, I posted that entirely from memory.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
He is going to create Imperial fighters for ever piece of formal wear except bow ties...
Why is the X-Wing the only fightewr that looks like an letter from the back?
This is so exiciting! It's done wonders to break down the public perception of slashdotters!
I never understood why spacecraft need wings if they are operating outside an atmosphere. However, if they're designed for atmospheric flight they will need wings. None of the Star Wars designs based on letters of the Roman alphabet look particularly practical or efficient. Obviously they're just a gimmick. Star Wars is junk science fiction. It's really fantasy and religious myth. Mind you, it's all good fun, and the muppet characters like Yoda are cute.
Stick Men
I've always wondered if I can rebuild my lego mindstorms into some sort of robotic sex-toy.
Harald
But if I remember right, whenever you see any writing in the Star Wars movies it's all in a strange alpahbet, so how come the ships are named (and shaped!) after the Roman alphabet.
:)
Oh hang on, am I taking things too seriously?
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
You're a registered member of Slashdot !
Lego ought to hire this guy on the SPOT, these are STUNNINGLY good, beautiful designs.
I am the Barber of Seville.
It seems to be missing a few letters, namely å, ä and ö :(
/me ducks
Well that's hardly difficult seeing as they sucked ass. X wings and TIE fighters on the other hand looked like they actually had someone engage their brain before making them.
I think this was a great exercise; at least he was not driving around shooting at people!
I mean, he took a common exercise (Building and designing Lego things is pretty common in western culture) and he added a set of restrictions (the Roman Alphabet, The Star Wars Universe). By denying himself total creative freedom, he forced his mind to solve actual problems, but in a very creative way.
This is what they should be teaching in schools! Creative problem soling is the key to intelligent thought. Hell, I'd seriously consider hiring someone for a job if I knew they were good at building and designing Lego.
I think Lego should be a Required Learning Tool in all classrooms, at all grade levels. Tons of University engineering programs use Lego as a teaching aid.
The basic lego bricks may be ideal for very young children, but once you hit 6 or 7 you get very frustrated by the fact that there are no fighter canopies/big wheels/flexible hoses etc. Fortunately, in my case that was exactly when Lego started to produce more of these parts (I had a spiffy train set with quite a few specialized parts). The "old" parts were still useful of course, it's all about balance.
I agree that they have gone a tad overboard on the specialized parts in recent years, but the Star Wars line actually uses a lot of the old basic bricks, simply because they're needed to replicate the arbitrary shapes of the SW universe vehicles. I bought several SW Lego sets and they're loaded with great simple parts.
Freedom: "I won't!"
In the SW universe, cheap (eg. Luke's landspeeder) and ubiquitous repulsor "antigravity" technology has made atmospheric design a lot less important for space/aero vehicles. You just fly atmospherically with repulsors holding you up instead of aerodynamic lift. You'd design space fighters optimally for their space use, and worry much less, if at all, about what to do once they hit atmosphere. I assume there'd still be a niche for traditional fighter planes which could be designed to use "old-fashioned" aerodynamics.
Freedom: "I won't!"
And have them blow stuff up (imaginatively, of course).
Ah, to be a child again...
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
this is so depressing...I wanted to be a lego designer when I was a kid, and of course I've had dark ages since then that are still kind of going on, and few of my creations where anywhere near as cool as these.
Lego is coming out with some really cool stuff these days, getting back to their roots a bit, without being too blocky. Designer series come with pamphlets with like 30 or so creations (you can build 2 or 3 at the same time with the bricks provided) and the new Star Wars mini stuff, tiny scale, is really clever (though I've seen fans do similar stuff earlier.)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Ask a Star Wars fan about how Han Solo made a voyage in however many parsecs and prepare to boggle at the convoluted thought process behind the explanation.
... an explaination that happens to be true.
I am not a Star Wars fan at all (though I used to be a casual enjoyer of the movies, before episodes I and II), but this point isn't as convulated or silly as you may think.
Remember Einstein's equation: e=m (more commonly known as e=mc^2)? You can drop the c^2 if you chose your units to be such that c=1, meaning that the speed of light is little more than a constant that converts between two sets of units that essentially measure the same thing. Indeed, physcicists have proposed that we adopt more natural units that clarify this relationship.
Distance and time are likewise the same thing (as becomes apparent when dealing with general relativity).
You could measure time in units that describe how far light travels in a given period of time. While saying "just give me 300,000 kilometers, I'll be right with you" is a little more verbose the "just give me a second," the two are, in terms of physics, identical. Alternatively, you could say something is about a nanosecond distant, i.e. that object is one light-nanosecond away from your current position.
The fact that we didn't understand the relationships between space and time, nor that between energy and mass, is why we've ended up with two essentially incompatible units for each (meters vs. seconds, grams vs. Joules) which make the e=m relationship, and the distance vs. time relationship, appear more complex than they actually are.
So, saying one made a trip in x parsecs (which is silly sounding and undoubtably resulted from George Lucas not knowing a thing about physics or the units he was tossing about) isn't really as silly as one would think.
What is silly is that we still have different units for distance vs. time, and mass vs. energy, when in each case they are one and the same.
There, now you've read a 'convuluted' explaination by someone who hates what Star Wars has become and was never a very ardent fan
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Okay, explain something to me I never understood...why is the "B-wing" called that? It's not even close to looking like a "B". If anything it's a lowercase "t".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The S-Wing is a deliberate homage to the origin of Legos in Space-the first Classic Space sets released, back in the late '70s. The S-Wing is a deliberate re-make of the 918 .Space.
http://guide.lugnet.com/set/918_1
One of the most famous sets ever made, the 918 was one of the original three classic spaceships released by Lego. Jon did not "give up", he built a deliberate homage to the Holy Grail of
http://news.lugnet.com/space/
Space. Forever!
Wouldn't a TIE fighter be an H-Wing (or an I-Wing if it's trying to avoid a laser blast from the Millennium Falcon at the time)?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
goodness me, yes! i had the same problem and it really aggravated me. i remember the happy day that i discovered the skinny transparent pieces so i could at least use only skinny pieces to create ships...of course, trying to create missiles was another story...
ah, the good old days when i could reconstruct the argo from the big blue 2x8 bricks...i never did have enough pieces to make appropriately scaled fighters...
[waxes nostalgic]
32 years old and here i am waxing nostalgic about freaking legos. this is telling. i'm not sure if it's in a good or bad way, but it's definitely telling.
[sighs]
ed
This is the first Lego-related article that hasn't immediately been slashdotted. Apparently the Lego community has learned not to host web sites on servers made of Legos...
Indeed. Lego is Danish, so it'd be fun to see what he could make with æ, ø and å. :)
The umlauted letters are in Swedish, Finnish, German, etc.
What the F?
Yes, but what about rich Corinthian leather?
thanks captain obvious! what will we do without you?
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
This really is sad...
So, one day, on a website devoted to Nerds, someone asks why the spacecraft have wings.
Someone else has to point out that they do fly through the atmosphere, which means, wings are a good thing to have, unless you enjoy making craters on every landing...
AND SOMEONE HAS TO MOD THAT POST AS INSIGHTFUL.
Which, lets be quite honest, it isn't very insightful at all: "Things that fly-wings helpful."
No offense intended to p3do, because it needed to be said. And props to the moderator who found it important to mod up, they were right.
Its just damn scary someone drug things down to the point that a statment of the obvious becomes insightful.
*grin*
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
> But does it look like an S?
No, it looks like a Winnebago.
I would like to see him build one fighter for every traditional chinese character in existance.
So what are YOU doing for the rest of your life?
My rights don't need management.