The link to this page may be incorrect or out of date.2. You may have bookmarked a page that has moved.FIND MORE PRODUCTS LIKE THISInspired by this awesome estimation of the cost to build a Death Star. I won’t tell you their estimate; you will have to click the link to find out yourselves. Then there was a discussion I had with some friends. We came to the conclusion that the Lego Millennium Falcon was so cool because it was to the proper scale for Lego mini figs. No, we are not talking about the Millennium Falcon on the Lego store; this older one that they don’t sell anymore (the Ultimate version). Just like the Lego Falcon they made a Lego version of the Death Star, but it wasn’t to scale. Yes, they do make another version of the Death Star, but they don’t even try to pretend it is to scale. First, how big is the REAL Death Star? Well, there were two (Episode IV and Episode VI). Apparently, these two Death Stars were not the same size. According to Wookiepedia, the first Death Star had a diameter of 160 km.
Need the dimensions of a mini fig? The internet is here for you. That site appears to say the height of a mini fig is 38.6 mm tall. If I assume an average human height of 1.77 meters, this would mean the scale of the mini fig is: So, a to-scale Lego Death Star (first version) would be 0.022 times the diameter of the REAL Death Star. This would put the diameter of the Lego Death Star at 3.52 km. That’s a pretty big Lego model. This is what it would look like next to the world’s tallest buildings. (The tallest one is around 600 meters.) I told you it was huge. If the scale version of the Death Star came in a set, how many pieces would it have? The first question we need to answer (we will answer it together) is: what will be on the inside of the Lego Death Star? There will have to be some things in there to make it support the outside. Probably if you want a scale model of the Death Star, you want everything. Garbage compactor and all. So, assuming the inside of the model has structure I need to get an estimate for the density.
Let’s go back to the Ultimate Millennium Falcon model. , the model has 5,195 pieces. It has dimensions of 84 cm x 56 cm x 21 cm. If I assume this is rectangular-ish, I can determine the Lego piece-density: This is just an estimate, but one I am fairly happy with. Sure there are some large pieces in the Millennium Falcon model but there are also some small ones. I guess it is possible the Death Star would have a lower piece density (if it has more larger pieces). Using this density and the volume of the Ultimate Death Star model, I can get the number of pieces in the set. Maybe the Ultimate Death Star has more large pieces in the set. Let estimate there would be 1014 pieces in the set. Just to be safe. Really, I mean mass — but I like “weigh” in the title better. So, for this, I need the mass density of a Lego set. The Ultimate Millennium Falcon is listed at a shipping weight of 24.2 pounds. Of course this must include the box and the instructions, so maybe the pieces would weigh around 21 pounds (9.5 kg).
This would give a mass density of 96.2 kg/m3. Just a quick check on the Lego Death Star II, it has a mass density of about 85 kg/m3 — and it isn’t even complete. Let me just go with a density of 90 kg/m3. With this density (mass density) my Super Ultimate Lego Death Star will have a mass of: I don’t know what to say about the mass. This is going to be a stretch. But here is a graph of the price of different Lego sets as a function of the number of pieces (from a very old post): If I assume the function stays linear for up to 1015 pieces (which would be odd to not give some sort of large set discount), then I get about $0.098 USD per piece. So, for all the pieces this would cost about 9.8 x 1012 US dollars, yes almost 10 trillion dollars. Really, this is your only option if you want to build something like this. The biggest problem on the surface of the Earth would be supporting the thing. Suppose I build a base to hold it up that is about 0.3 km across. All of the weight of the Death Star would have to be supported on top of this.
This would be a compressive pressure of about 2.4 x 108 N/m2. Just for a comparison, granite (Engineering Toolbox) has a maximum compressive strength of 1.3 x 108 N/m2. So, we are talking about some structural failures here. If you put it in orbit, you don’t have to worry about this compressive strength problem. Also, you could move around to different parts of the model to build it. Here are some other questions that I didn’t get around to answering: That should keep you busy for a while. Oh, I noticed that a few more of the Lego Star Wars models were not to scale. This needs to be fixed. Just when you thought everything was over, it keeps going. What if this Lego set were indeed in orbit around the Earth? Low Earth orbit (with an altitude of 300 km). What would it look like? Well, first let me say that the angular size of the the moon is about 0.53 degrees. If this 3.52 km diameter radius object was in orbit, it would have an angular size of: So, it would appear bigger than the actual real moon.
You know I am going to make a diagram showing that. How cool would that be? People would mistake it for a moon, just like Han Solo did. Well, it look just like the moon except that it would just take a couple of minutes to pass across the sky where the moon doesn’t really seem to change its position.If you’ve got the time, lack of willpower when it comes to buying shiny things, space to house a giant plastic sphere, and the money, you actually might want to build it anyway. Given how much I’ve written about Lego on io9, it’d be safe to assume that I’ve built a lot of it in my time. So when the company recently retired its old Death Star collector’s set (a set popular enough to have been continuously sold since 2008) to make way for shiny new version that was basically the same, with a few upgrades and new minifigures, I saw it as an opportunity to stretch my usual Lego habits: get a set I’d long been wanting to own, and build something considerably larger than any other Lego set I’d built before.
When Lego released all of its new Star Wars products at the end of September to mark Rogue One’s “Force Friday,” I threw down a considerable chunk of money—$500, to be precise, making this both one of the biggest and most expensive Lego sets available—and eagerly awaited its arrival. A few weekends ago, massive box in hand, I made way to my kitchen table and set to work. Then I opened the Death Star box, and suddenly started worrying.Then I started sorting out bag after bag of Lego bricks out on the table, and started worrying even more.The thing is, you don’t really think about the fact that four thousand pieces of Lego—4,016, to be precise—is a humongous amount of Legos until you see them splayed out on your kitchen table in an endless sea of studded bricks, threatening to consume everything in sight. Had I bitten off way more than I could chew? Was I actually going to finish it in a day, or even a weekend? Was I beginning to have a really bad feeling about all this?
I did the only thing an idiotic blogger who’d gleefully told his colleagues about buying something extremely dumb thinking it would make a great blog the week before could do: I sat down and started sorting Lego bricks like my life depended on it. Or, at least, my free time. The first section of the Death Star you build is, unsurprisingly, the base. It looks big here, but it’s actually tiny compared to the rest of the superstructure you go on to build on it. By the end of that first weekend, I mostly felt like I hated myself (for buying the Death Star), Lego (for making it), and the Empire itself (for designing everything in the exact two same shades of grey). The process of building a modern Lego set, unlike the sets of your childhood where you spent just as much time rooting around the box for the one piece you needed, is highly regimented—section by section, it’s divided and split into sets of bags, easily numbered so you know which exact amounts you need to build each specific piece.
It tightens your focus into the moment-to-moment building of a set, rather than the bigger picture, regardless of how big that bigger picture actually is—in this case, the bigger picture is a daunting, 16" by 16" diameter sphere.Sometimes that process is mundane—like repeating the pattern of building the same structure for a piece of flooring that you’ll end up doing another three times in a row to create each of the four layers of the Death Star, or the curved walls that will give the final playset its spheroid shape. Its in those moments you’ll hate building the Death Star the most, as your raw fingers, slowly being shredded by pressing down on pointy plastic bricks, get dragged into doing the same pattern over and over again. But sometimes, that process is taking you through some truly clever and ingenious bits of design work that makes you appreciate the effort that goes into creating sets as lavish as these. The Death Star in particular is filled with “aha!” moments like this, because instead of just being a model of a spaceship or a vehicle, it’s a full-on play set.
There’s even a little dianoga you can slot through the floor of the trash compactor, like its peering through the trashy depths! The Death Star set isn’t really an accurate recreation of the infamous battle station—it’d be impossible, if not a little boring, to try and achieve that. Instead, it’s a series of vignettes of things you remember happening on the Death Star in A New Hope—and, for one section, slightly awkwardly, Return of the Jedi. So you get a bit that’s the trash compactor. A bit that’s the detention block Han and Luke break Leia out of. You get the bit where Obi-Wan disables the tractor beam. The aforementioned Return of the Jedi bit is actually the Emperor’s throne room, complete with highly unsafe giant chasms and falling gangways. These little scenes are complete and engaging builds on their own, before you consider the place they take in the overall look of the final Death Star. They’re filled with play features that might seem simple when built, but while you’re putting them together, it will make you feel like the greatest engineer on the planet.
Even something as simple as a winch-operated lift.The fact that it took me over 20 hours to make the Death Star, all in all—spread out over two weekends—might seem like it’s far too much effort for a Lego set. But it was these moments of cleverness, how the thing you had no idea what you were building was meant to be until finally slots into a larger whole, that made that time feel well spent. The other bit that made it worth it, unsurprisingly, was the cavalcade of delightful Star Wars characters you got to populate the Death Star with once you’d finally put it together. Witness the firepower, etc. etc. No Lego Star Wars set is really complete without minifigures, and the Death Star doesn’t skimp on them, either. Aside from little brick-built bonuses like a mouse droid or the dianoga, it comes with 25 figures. You get your heroes... Look at that fabulous head of hair on Han Solo. A whole swathe of figures specific to Return of the Jedi for the Emperor’s throne room...
I swear that’s Grand Moff Tarkin in the middle, not a very confused Lego Twelfth Doctor. Stormtroopers—two of which are Han and Luke in disguise, which have spare helmets to turn into normal troopers... Sterner face, same majestic Han Solo hair. And, perhaps coolest of all, some extra Death Star personnel—Gunners and officers you can flesh out the generic areas of the playset with, whether its preparing to fire the superlaser, or standing around a briefing room: The helmets on these guys are spectacular. While they’re all delightful figures on their own, like the Death Star itself, it’s only when the whole thing comes together that they truly shine. The Death Star is an amazing model on its own, but when you start fiddling with all the figures and mucking about with the actual playset elements of it all, it becomes more enjoyable than you could have possibly imagined. If you love Star Wars and you love Lego, and have got the time (and space) to dedicate to it, there’s not an exhaust port’s of weakness in sight on a battle station as wonderful as this.