Here comes the story of the Hurricane

During last year's SHIPtember,  Tim Schwalfenberg stepped forward with the quite excellent Hurricane Battlecruiser, which landed him a well deserved win for the contest. Since then, he's been hard at work on the rest of the fleet. Although much smaller, they are no less magnificent. I've highlighted my favorites below, but make sure to check out the entire fleet, as they are all spectacular builds which maintain a wonderful design and color cohesion throughout.

Bugatti Vendicatore

I'm a total sucker for small, compact spaceships that look functional. This Bugatti Vendicatore by David Hensel is an excellent example of how you don't have to build big to build beautiful. It incorporates a great mix of technic panels and constraction parts that offer up a great bulky shape, and create some really interesting front air intakes. It's easy to imagine a swarm of these offering forth from the bowels of a giant capital ship. Extra kudos on the sharp photography and edit.

Your base is under attack!

As we roll into the biggest AFOL conventions of the year, one of the best things to see is all of the wonderful collaborative efforts that builders come out of the woodwork with. This year is no different, with nine different builders pooling their collective talents on a huge Microscale Starcraft II project. I've selected some of my personal favorites below, but you can view all of them in the group's Flickr pool. And since I was a die-hard Terran player in my day, I can't resist - YOU WANT A PIECE OF ME, BOY?!?!

Raising the Bar Bar

Everyone's favorite character in the Star Wars universe has long ears, a big schnozola, and is pretty good with accidentally killing off battle droids in the heat of battle.  And despite helping to fend off Phantom Menaces, he helps evil politicians become Sith lords and basically disappears by the third act of a lousy bunch of prequels.  Sadly, this character will likely never become a part of the forthcoming LEGO Constraction line, here's Flickr user Letranger Absurde's excellent take on Jar Jar Binks, making clever use of 1x2 log bricks as feet, skeleton minifig arms as fingers, and smooth sloping elements all around.  Still trying to figure out, though, if Letranger is trying to tell us something by having this particular Gungan walk on water.