One of my long term projects is to build an economic simulation of the Traveller universe. This involves modelling planets, their societies, trade requirements and also the movement of the star ships that make interstellar trade possible.

      <a href="/traveller/resources/spaceships/lowtech/scaled.svg">
          <img src="/news/images/lego.jpg" width="520" height="75"
              alt="Scale chart of spacecraft" title="Scale chart of spacecraft"/>
      </a>

Whilst procrastinating over the finer points of planetary resource requirements, I've sidetracked myself into fleshing out a few starship designs. After all, if I'm to have an interesting model, then I need lots of interesting ships flying around. Previously I've used starship miniatures (mostly from Ground Zero Games) to represent what ships look like, but I have only so many of those which are suitable as merchant ships.

An idea that I've now hit upon is to use Lego to model each ship. It's quick and easy to put together an idea, and I can resize the photos as required. They don't look as good as a fully sculptured model, but they help visualisation of scale and appearance a great deal. After I'm done, I can pull them apart and rebuild into something new. Excellent.

The current set of designs are here, and more probably to follow soon.