Once he had the hull mapped
out, he moved on to the specif-
ics. “Of the 15 months I spent
designing and building this
thing, most were spent in this
software,” he says. “I jumped
back and forth a lot between
crafting the aesthetically
pleasing parts of the model—
the plating and turrets—and
refining the superstructure
underlying it all. Every time I
designed something, I had to
find places to hook it together. I
just hoped it would stick without
breaking apart.”
Charles’ biggest design chal-
lenge (and concession) was
the ship’s bridge—the oblong
hexagon that towers above the
wedge-like body. “I wanted it to
be proportionally accurate,” he
says. “But I had to give in and
make it about four studs too
wide. I had all these beautiful
design elements that wouldn’t
fit if I made it smaller, and I
couldn’t bear to lose them.”
After 11 months, Charles’s
design was finished, and Stu-
dio 2.0 gave him a parts list
of almost 20,000 individual
bricks, which he uploaded into a
fan-written inventory software
called BrickStock.
BrickStock is connected to a
database of every type of indi-
vidual brick the LEGO Group
has ever produced. LEGO has
more than 3,400 unique plas-
tic pieces in over 60 colors on
record, from the classic 2x4
brick to LEGO tires and dino-
saur jaws.
Using BrickStock, Charles
found he already had about 8,500
of the 20,000 required destroyer
pieces from various LEGO setsand lots he’d collected at garage
sales and online marketplaces.
He purchased some remaining
parts from the LEGO Group’s
online “Pick A Brick” service,
but he sourced most of them
from BrickLink, the fan com-
munity’s massive secondhand
market.
Moore claims BrickLink is the
largest eBay-style marketplace
for secondhand LEGOs, boast-
ing more than 10,000 worldwide
sellers. There’s plenty of sup-
ply: The LEGO Group reports
producing more than 40 billion
bricks annually, about 4 million
per hour. What’s more, LEGO
announced in late 2019 they
would be purchasing BrickLink,
so whether you need a few spe-
cific parts for a Star Destroyer
or as many as you can melt down
(more on that later), you can find
what you need at going market
price: about 11 cents for a work-
horse 2x16 gray plate.
As Charles’s bricks poured
in, he started assembling his
destroyer using the massive
3,300-page custom instr uctionOnce, Charles
knocked over
his destroyer
by accident: “I
caught most of
it, then did what
I had to. I started
the instructions
over.”