A thing a week 2020, week 51

One more to go after today for 2020 which honestly can't be done soon enough.  In breaking with recent tradition, we're not talking minis today.  I'd feel weird holding a completed miniature done this year but counting toward next year so since I've got time off right now and I'm doing a lot of painting, we'll blow out 2020 with a flurry of hobbying...and some setup so that 2021 can start stronk.

This is a rebuild of a ship I built way back in 2020 which is a design from the comic I drew in the mid 90s.  It's interesting to think about all the stuff that's changed since then.  I'd only built three SHIPs, been to one show, and won one trophy (currently fourteen, ten, and eight respectively).  I've moved three times and changed jobs five times which is more of a reflection on the volatility of the games biz more than anything.  I've re-kindled my love of tabletop RPGs, built four-ish full systems (some variations) and finished three multi-year campaigns.  All of my mini painting this century is between these two points as is all of my BBQing and coffee roasting.  Seems like a lot when I writetype it out like that.

The original build was awfully fiddly and really didn't want to stay together at all.  I think I brought it to BrickFair VA 2011.  For the next four-ish years I've thought I should rebuild it.  In fact, when I moved to my current home in the Pacific Northwest and got my Lego area sorted sometime in 2015, I did try to rebuild it.  Badly.  I put maybe twenty hours into it trying to get the angles right and experimenting with getting the right proportions.  I may have gone through three iterations of different construction methods before chucking the thing with most of my dark blue collection in a bin and hiding it under a table.

Another five years would go by before I revisited the project.  This year has been demonstrably crap and my work from home desk is my Lego desk.  SHIPtember probably wasn't happening this year but it really couldn't without a real space to build.  My second table in this room is smaller and has been a dumping ground for Lego related stuff for years now.  Among other things, I made a concerted effort to clean it and low and behold, the Osprey prototype turned up.  I'd really like to build another SHIP, a really big and complicated one, so right around Virtual BrickCon this year, I got back to it.

Another twenty-ish hours in small chunks over a month or so solved most of the biggest problems I had.  It sits at an angle to reduce the weight on the wings which sags noticeably if the ship is horizontal.  Also, it looks like it's taking off which is cool.  I'm glad to have this guy complete, not just because it frees up quite a lot of brick in a color I quite like.  It's more that it isn't hanging over my head anymore which counts for something.