It is no secret that most people like to play with Lego, but some people really like it to an extreme degree. Lego’s Idea platform lets people submit designs for review and also lets users vote on these designs. If accepted, the company works with the designer to put a kit in production and they share in the profits. [Christophe Ruge] submitted his design for the International Space Station and three years later, you can buy it on the Lego website.
The kit has 864 parts and the finished model is 12″ x 19″ x 7″ — probably will take longer than a coffee break to finish it. The model even includes the two rotating Solar Alpha Rotary Joints that allow the solar panels to align with the sun. You can see [Scott] building his on a recorded live stream below if you have 3 hours to kill.
The $70 price isn’t bad. You can spend a lot more on a kit that is probably a lot more work. It looks pretty accurate, too.
We suspect the build might be above our average Lego skill level. However, the build instruction link on the Lego website doesn’t pull up anything yet, so it is too early to tell. If it were not so big, we’d probably do the paper version, instead.
We shouldn’t be surprised about a Lego space station. After all, we’ve seen a drone and a submarine.
I have a Rule of Thumb I use when buying LEGO.
Divide the Price by the number of Pieces.
If the result is less than $0.10 per piece, I’ll consider buying it.
If the price is less than $0.05 per piece, I’ll probably buy it.
Depends, it can go up to 0.15 for me. I bought the volvo wheel loader for about that and got:
2 linear actuators
1 xl motor
1 lg motor
1 sm motor
1 servo motor
2x ir controllers
2x ir decoders
lots of nice pieces.
it’s not just about the parts count, but the either hard to find parts, or high quality assortment of parts.
when i was a kid id always ask for sets that had parts that i didnt already have.
Whoa! I had never heard/seen of a LEGO Volvo Wheel Loader!
($130 is about the highest price of LEGO found in stores locally).
https://www.amazon.com/LEGO-Technic-42030-Remote-Controlled/dp/B00HR1M8KK
May I ask, where did you source yours?
“You can spend a lot more on a kit that is probably a lot more work” – no idea what this means.
Well, I mean you can buy ISS kits that cost more and are harder to put together. Or so I assume since I haven’t put the Lego one together.
In the stores here in the City (Queens and Manhattan, Madison Square Garden, and the Queens Center Mall) they have a Star Destroyer shown. It looks every bit as unpleasant as the ones built for all of the movies, but especially for the one that got us all started. I believe it’s just as complicated. And they also sell one that’s probably based on NASA drawings for the Cislunar orbit space station.
Just clicked on the “Build Instructions” link and they came up fine for me. You have to select the instruction booklet language/version that you want, then scroll down and click on the black “Download PDF” button.
Cool but not quite as cool as the awesome Lunar Lander or the even more awesome Saturn V Rocket.