In today's post I will show you my latest MOC: the castle of Colditz. Well a part of it at least. Since I'm a kid the story of this castle during the World War II has amazed me. Some of the most important prisoners of the Allied troops in the same castle lost in the middle of Saxony. Sounds good right?
The castle in April 1945. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oflag_IV-C
Far away from any frontier there was a castle that was used by the Germans to send the most valuable prisoners they got. Painted in a sad gray color the walls of this castle saw many escape attempts and here is where the legend begins. It started with Polish prisoners in late 1939. Germany invaded their country and some were sent to this castle now called Oflag IV-C. This place had mainly officers inside during the war. In october 1940 the first British officers arrived to the camp. Then French and Dutch officers and soldiers came included 2 Yugoslavian. In April 1941 the French officer Alain Le Ray became the first man to escape from Colditz. During the war many escape attempts were made but most of them were unsuccsessfull. From soldiers dressed up as women to a 110 kilograms glider made of whatever the poor prisoners could find. Between 30 and 36 men succeded and escaped the castle. The German garrison (around 70 men) abided the Geneva Convention and there were even agreements between the prisoners and the camp staff where the Germans understood the prisoners wanted to escape but the Allied prisoners wouldn't use borrowed tools to make their attempts. If they catched you while trying to escape you would be put in a confinement alone but your life wouldn't be on risk like in many other camps. The camp was finally liberated by the 1st US Army in April 1945. Some of the "celebrities" inside were the creator of the SAS David Stirling (little spoiler for the next season I guess if you watch SAS Rogue Heroes from HBO) the son of WWI marshall Douglas Haig or the son of the Viceroy of India. The nephew of Winston Churchill's wife was here too and Adolf Hitler specified that he was to be treated with the outmost care.
The castle nowadays. Source: https://www.the-tls.com/history/modern-history/colditz-ben-macintyre-the-traitor-of-colditz-robert-verkaik-book-review-roderick-bailey
Nowadays the castle is painted white and you can visit it if you want to. The story about it is pretty interesting and I recommend you read about it if you want to know more. It's worth to mention too that a prisoner years later created a table game and there are films and TV shows about it. There are videogames about it too like a mission in a Commandos game. A pretty interesting topic about the war.
For this build I wanted to show a bit of the interior of the castle and I decided to add too a escape tunnel like the ones the real prisoners there did. It doesn't represent any specific part of the real castle. I intended to build a smaller MOC but once I decided to use my Opel Blitz for the build I needed to make it bigger. It was worth it I would say. I really like how it looks in the build. In this build the only thing I'm not happy with is the roof. I didn't find the correct parts to do it with tiles since the 90º corner difficults all. Either I had enough slopes to do it higher plus one side would be higher than the other and that would look weird. To be fair I haven't think about the roof design until I reached that final part of the build where only the roof was left. I'm sorry for the bad pictures I took. This time most of them are done with my phone. I need to change my camera tripod!
The build has two identical rooms.
The other room which isn't seen during the scrapping process.
The hall.
I enjoyed building this MOC. I love how the windows look specially inside. It has light too in the hall section and I love how they look. It is a build I had in my mind for a couple years and even I wanted to make it bigger it looked really cool as I imagined which is something to be happy about because most of the times the final result isn't as good as the original idea I had. The minifigs for this MOC are my Old Dark Gray Germans which use Roaglaan decals and some combos I did for the prisoners and the civilian. I had to paint again some stuff because the paint of the soldiers' gear gets damaged over the years.
A civilian who came to assemble the door into it's place.
My favourite minifig of the MOC.
The visible room in detail.
Now the following pictures were taken with the camera and look darker. Sorry for that.
The prisoner trying to escape.
Many thanks for reading this post guys. Here is the YouTube video I did for the build and I recommend you watch it because it includes videos that show more about the build.
Last January I received this set from Misini to show it on Instagram but I wanted to write a little review here too. As the previous models it looks awesome. I think because of the design of a ship (really long but thin) they are what looks better once displayed. It looks huge and is beautiful. But before I describe the build itself I want to give you some context of its real counterpart as I usually do. The Arleigh Burke-class ships are guided-missile destroyers centered in the modern electronic war. They owe its name to the admiral Arleigh Burke who fought in World War II and the Korean War. These destroyers have the capability to store and deploy helicopters and UAV's from their two hangars since they are big ships making 505 or 509.5 feet long depending on the version (154m or 155,3m). The production started in the 90s and once the ones in the making are completed the US Navy should have 99 of them. I'm no expert so if you want to know the weaponry it has you should search for it because it can carry a variety of guns and missiles so large that I hope the USA never invades my country.
The build is 77.5cm long 11.5cm wide and 30cm tall including the base. It isn't a difficult build although it consists of 3601 pieces of all kind of sizes. Stickers in this set are easy to apply and there aren't too many of them so that's great because I hate stickers on sets. Quality of the bricks like the previous Misini sets I got is very good. Almost like LEGO parts. It features 2 MH-60 helicopters and the turrets and the propellers move which is a cool detail.
All the parts come in bags like regular LEGO sets. There are usually 3 boxes per each step and there are 20 steps to do. Instructions are easy to follow as usual but this time there was a problem and there were some missing pages. I hope it is fixed in the copies they print nowadays. I told them and hours later they sent me pictures of the missing pages.
I hope you like it as much as I do. It is very different from what I usually build and I'm quite happy with it. If you are interested here is a link to their store through my affiliate link: https://misinimoc.com/ref=ari23#
The decade of the 90s was a tricky one for Russia. The USSR fell in 1991 and then Russia inherited the crisis of the Soviet state. A moment like this feels like the perfect moment to declare your independence if you rule a region and that is your goal. So the Chechens did it. To understand why Chechenya wanted its independence we must aknowledge the many differences existing between this region and the Russian state. First of all the Chechens weren't Russians. It wasn't their ethnicity either it was their culture. They didn't even share a religion since most of the Chechens are Sunni muslims and Russians are mainly Christian Ortodox. Russia was basically seen as an invasor. Opposite to this view we have the Russian government who saw the region as an important asset to their geopolitics. It was possible that if other regions saw they could declare their independence as Chechenya did then they would declare it too and that was a threat the Russian government with Boris Yeltsin at the head wouldn't tolerate. On December 1994 the war started and around 20 months later the war finished with Russia as the loser of a war that they thought would only take days. The same story repeats over and over again huh?
Here you can see the build itself. It took me around 2 months. It has around 5 floors. The bottom ones belog to a grocery store and the upper ones are residential ones. This time there isn't a clear inspiration for the building since I couldn't find many info on the building desings of the 90s Chechenya. Anyway I hope it looks kinda similar to what the buildings looked like back then. The basement has a light I put inside the closed part (in the space behind the black bricks). This MOC isn't the one I enjoyed the most because as it grew tall I got more and more lost on how to finish the building. There was space to recreate more things (more rooms or a sewer tunnel) but I just couldn't figure out what I wanted for this build to look like when finished. Anyway I tested some new stuff that will be helpful in the future like the gap made of plates in the middle of the wall right over the car and the door of the store. It may look a bit off in this build but I will make it better in future builds. I saw people at Instagram doing it and I think it can look really good. Minifigs have also been a problem. I'm happy with how the Russian ones look even their body is from random soldiers bought at AliExpress and it looks similar to 90s Russian uniforms but it isn't accurate if you compare to their real counterparts. With the Chechen fighters I had more trouble. I couldn't get an accurate idea of how they really looked like in real life so I improvised inspired by some clips and pictures I found about the first and second of the wars happened in Chechenya in that era. The car was one of my main motivations for the build and it looks bad compared to the idea I had. It's supposed to be a Lada Niva. I need to work more on making cars.
I will give this topic another try in the future. This conflict happened 30 years ago so I hope if somehow someone related to the war and the consequences it had sees this post or the build somewhere I really hope they understand one of the reasons for me to build and share stuff like that is to pay tribute to the many people that sadly uses to die and get injured in the wars and that we must not forget them otherwise feels like they died for nothing. Now all the pictures I took and video I uploaded to YouTube.
Thanks to the suggestions you often give me on YouTube and so I discovered the Byzantine products made by Loongbrick and decided to buy some accessories to build minifigures of the Eastern Roman Empire.
As you may know I love the Roman Empire era and I consider the Eastern Roman Empire to be the true continuation of the Roman state. It has a rich story and the possibilities to create MOCs and other content about it are very extensive. Did you know that even though it is often treated as something separate its people saw themselves as Romans and some continued to do so until the 19th century?
For nearly a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 this empire preserved Roman law, administration, and classical knowledge while fighting enemies ranging from the northern warriors of the Rus to the many Islamic empires that rose in the Middle East.
The possibilities when you create combos using different accessories and colors for the minifig bodies is very extensive. It is really fun to create these combos and in the last weeks they added even more Byzantine products so now there are even more options to choose. The soldiers you see here represent heavy infantry and cavalry. The quality of the products is awesome. They are made of rigid resin with good hardness and certain toughness as they say in their store. It is true. The colors are applied manually they say too. Based on what I saw searching for information I would say these minifigs and accessories fit the period going from the year 1000 or 1100 to 1300 or even the end of the empire in the 1450s. I will use them to represent any period from 900 to the end of the empire in the year 1453. I would really recommend these accessories if you like them because I think these are some of my best minifigs. You can see clothes from Capes4Minifigs too because I wanted to test how they look mixed with the armor and I'm quite happy with the result. In the future I will test more and get more stuff from Capes4Minifigs to use with these minifigs. In the next pictures I show you the reference pictures to create these minifigs.
And now talking about the future and what I will do with them I'm planning on building a MOC about a watchtower in Greece. The story about the tower and the land around it is interesting and I want to create a video explaining it. In the long term I would love to build a section of the Theodosian walls during the siege of Constantinople. I think it could look amazing but I would need to create proper Ottoman soldiers and many more tan parts! What would you do or build with them? Do you like them? Let me know!
You can watch the Youtube video I posted about them here:
Welcome back to Die Bricke Wochenschau. This week we take a look at my latest MOC. This one is a small one I built in like 5 hours (3 of them to build the tree) and I think it will be the first of some but we will see. I plan my next bigger MOC to be about the First Chechen War but in the meantime I want to build some smaller MOCs. This first one is inspired by a visit I made in September 2024 to Hostalrich castle where as every year Napoleonic Wars reenactors were there recreating different daily scenes of the Napoleonic era armies and the French ones had tents built as if they were resting. I will show you a picture of it too. One day I will build a MOC about the castle because the story it has is interesting and the desing is really cool. Since I saw it I wanted to recreate one of these tents in LEGO so shortly after I built some wedge plates to do the triangle shape they have when you look their front part. Because of different reasons it wasn't until now that I decided to build it and I wanted to test again building trees too. I wanted a tree to go next to it in a simple scene but I think it looks nice. In the scene a soldier and an official talk in front of the tent that lies next to a tree to partially cover it from the Sun.
For the first time ever I counted how many parts I used (I did it counting them while scrapping the MOC) and the total amount is 862. The tree you see has almost half of them. I'm really happy with how the whole MOC turned out. The tent looks really good I think and the tree too. It represents a tree that could be found at any Mediterranean country. As always I guess it can be improved and I will think of ways to do it. The technic for the tree is the best one I used so far. Even there are many kind of trees and plants in the world and you can't use the same technics for them all I think this is still the best tree I have built so far. It was the part I enjoyed the most building and I would love to build a MOC someday with some of them in a scene representing a forest or a Roman Villa for example. The trunk is made with plates on 4 sides holded by 1x1 bricks with a stud on one side. Next time the challenge will be to recreate some roots of the tree coming out of the floor!
The scene that inspired the MOC. Yes I deleted 2 persons. (Hostalrich castle September 2024)
As always I hope you enjoyed this build guys. This time was smaller but I think it is enjoyable too.
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