The first dark age ends
In 2000 I stepped over a shrub in the work car park and felt a nasty twinge. Still, I walked to the train station and then home but the next day my knee had swollen painfully. I was a mystery to medical science and was told to take 2 weeks off and not walk on it. I was phlegmatic.
I’d built up a large collection of Lego but as an adult I never made anything other than the included instructions. This seemed like a shame, a derth of imagination, missing the point of Lego. Here was a great chance to do something about that. However anything I built would have to be:
- on a Grand scale and utilise a large proportion of my collection
- include some technical innovation
- be better than an official set (ah the hubris!)
- oh and buying more Lego was cheating
Since I was a kid I’ve had the idea of building a circular six engine in Lego based on the old blue go kart. I still think my ideas of 60° angles were ahead of their time. Once I’d got the engine I needed a vehicle for it to drive.
I loved the Audi Quattro, one of the first 4 wheel drives, compounded by a visit to a showroom with my Dad where the salesman gave me a photo of one in full-on rally kit. I was sure that it was possible to build suspension, steering and drive on the same axle without resorting to this kind of cheating.
The final influence came later when I was building the boiler room. I was all set to use one of those sloping computer terminals from Classic Space when I realised that a Victorian tech level based around pneumatics, levers and cogs would suit the massive engine much better. Mind you this was in a time when Steampunk was neither profitable nor popular.
Talking of steampunk: imagine a steam train the size of city block, painted with insane levels of detail in the style Peter Elson, all smoke and sparks. A robot in the foreground mace raised, similar robots beside the leviathan, at the point of resolution, to really ram home the scale. I’ve no idea whether the book was any good (or even featured such an engineering marvel) but the cover is still the best bit of steampunk I’ve ever seen. Wouldn’t it be great if the people of the internet could provide me with a scan of the cover?
