Precedents

Babylon 5 is a science-fiction TV series that was broadcasted on the USA between the years 1994 and 1998. Nevertheless the story began on February 1993 with a backdoor pilot of 90 minutes, and after which some adjustments were made like, for example, characters and make-up. The series had also some TV films that continued the story and the short-life spin-off Crusade, which was unable to finish its first season. Created by J. Michael Straczynski and taken place between 2257 and 2262, it was pioneer in two aspects. The first one, its use of digital effects. Seen now they can seem extremely simple, but in its day were a little revolution on TV. The other, and more important, aspect is that maybe was the first (and only?) TV series whose development for the five seasons was known beforehand. As a curiosity, its creator wrote 92 of the 110 episodes of the series, which included the whole 3rd and 4th seasons, something not known before on American television. The name of the series comes from the space station around which the series took place. Its structure is a variation of the O'Neill Cylinder, and the final '5' is due to the existence of four previous space stations that could not begin operating. The station is 5 mile long (8 km), This is the original station:

The MOC

The story of the MOC

This MOC took me 7 months between design and building, and in the first 6 ones it was the only MOC on which I worked. The first LDD is dated June 24th, 2012 and the MOC was finally finished on January 29th, 2013. During these months there were changes in scale (two, one bigger and one smaller than the final design), not very clear ideas on how to continue, structural problems (LDD does not take into account gravity law) that led to the reconstruction of the interior of the station and its tail. For achieving the stability of the tail I had to make a central structure of 2x2 studs that goes along almost the whole central part and the whole tail. Nevertheless the forward section is composed of three interconnectable modules. In order to achieve the shape of the station, lots of SNOT techniques had to be used.

It is 84 cm long and has a total of 2.332 pieces (plus a sticker). Of them 1.904 are Plates, Tiles or Cheese Slopes, and of the remaining, 270 are several variations of Bricks 1x1.