Remarkable Rocket

Now you’re probably thinking what I’m thinking. “Wait,” you think. “This is Minecraft. Wouldn’t any replicas you build inside the game be smaller than real life not bigger?”

“Not exactly,” Philipp explains. “A Minecraft player model is 2 blocks high. So I can assume 1 block is 1 meter.” And that makes sense if you think about it.

The average man is 1.78 meters tall (that’s 5 feet 10 inches for all the deviants not on the metric system). Round that up to 2 meters even (6 feet) and you’re at 1 meter per Minecraft block.

(Just so you know, I asked Tom to check with the Minecraft Bureau of Weights and Measures—the calculations check out.)

“The full length of the shuttle with boosters and the orbiter mounted on the fuel tank is 56.1 meters,” Philipp continues. That means a 1:1 scale replica of the space shuttle would be only 56 blocks high, and while that’s pretty tall, that’s simply not BIG.

But if you scale up the model from 1:1 to 11:1 you get a whopping 617.1 meters.

“Our replica is 617 blocks long, 261 blocks wide, and 253 blocks high.”

The shuttle is so big, Philipp notes he and LostinSpace had to build the shuttle on it’s side, not straight up and down like you’d see it on the launch pad.

“The 256-block height cutoff is a big limitation for scale builders. Because of that, most builders choose to create models that are larger in horizontal directions, like ships.”

Philipp has built lots of ships before, it’s how he met his building buddy LostinSpace.

“I met LostInSpace on Youtube. He asked me if I could build the USS Arizona for him then invite him to my server so he could see the finished product,” Philipp says. “I agreed, but we had so much fun that I invited him much earlier than expected and we ended up working on the ship together. From there, we kinda developed our own personal style that worked in tandem with each other. He was the ‘helping hand’, filling in open spaces and copying elements from one side to another. While I was the drafter, I collected the data and did the calculations then transferred that information into Minecraft.”

Speaking of data and calculations, Philipp did all the data-ing by hand. With all the programs available to make building such huge projects easier, this was done the old fashioned way.

“The easiest part was definitely making the tank, because it has a simple shape. The hardest was the wing since it’s really complex. That it was possible to make all these little details at this size, I’m really proud of how this turned out.”