Steampunk Lego

Filled with dirigibles and floating cities, penny-farthings and pirate ships, curiosities and robots galore, Steampunk LEGO is an illustrated collection of Victorian-era sci-fi treasures, all built from LEGO. Curated by award-winning LEGO builder and special effects master Guy Himber, this full-color coffee table book showcases an eclectic variety of models designed by dozens of the world’s best LEGO artists. Grab your brass goggles and join fictional explorer Sir Herbert Jobson as he travels the world cataloguing its technological wonders for Queen Victoria. His entertaining descriptions of an imaginative alternate history bring these delightful LEGO models to swashbuckling life.

This comprehensive guide to Steampunk creations of all kinds offers inspiration and practical tips for bringing your own retro-futuristic visions to life. Whether you’re a newbie to the world of Steampunk, or a long-time enthusiast of airships, goggles, and mad scientists, The Steampunk User’s Manual is essential reading. The popular subgenre of science fiction has grown into a cultural movement; one that invites fans to let their imaginations go wild. In this volume, Jeff VanderMeer—the renowned expert in all things Steampunk—presents a practical and inspirational guidance for finding your own path into this realm. Including sections on art, fashion, architecture, crafts, music, performance, and storytelling, The Steampunk User's Manual provides a conceptual how-to guide on everything from the utterly doable to the completely over-the-top.

Unleash Your Inner Mechanical Mastermind Welcome to the wondrous world of Thomas Willeford, aka Lord Archibald "Feathers" Featherstone, in which he shares his closely guarded secrets of Steampunkery. Filled with do-it-yourself projects, Steampunk Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos: A Maker's Guide to Creating Modern Artifacts shows you how to build exquisite, ingenious contraptions on a budget. Learn from Lord Featherstone as he distills his wealth of hard-learned skills, describes how to use the readily available tools of the modern mad scientist, and expounds on the art and philosophy of scavenging unique components and raw materials. The perfect companion for the hobbyist and advanced machinist alike, this inventive volume will guide you through the creation of your very own infernal devices. Get steamed with these provocative projects: Aetheric ray deflector solid brass goggles Calibrated indicator gauges Ferromagnetic self-scribing automated encyclopedia (or, the Steampunk book drive) High voltage electro-static cannon (or, the lamp gun) Tesla-pod chrono-static insulating field generator (or, the mobile device enclosure) Altitude mask with integrated respiratory augmentation Armoured pith helmet Mark I superior replacement arm with integrated Gatling gun attachment Visit the companion website, www.mhprofessional.com/steampunk, for videos, images, and more bonus content! Make Great Stuff! TAB, an imprint of McGraw-Hill Professional, is a leading publisher of DIY technology books for makers, hackers, and electronics hobbyists.

This thoroughly updated second edition of the best-selling Unofficial LEGO Technic Builder’s Guide is filled with tips for building strong yet elegant machines and mechanisms with the LEGO Technic system. World-renowned builder Pawe? "Sariel" Kmiec covers the foundations of LEGO Technic building, from the concepts that underlie simple machines, like gears and linkages, to advanced mechanics, like differentials and steering systems. This edition adds 13 new building instructions and 4 completely new chapters on wheels, the RC system, planetary gearing, and 3D printing. You’ll get a hands-on introduction to fundamental mechanical concepts like torque, friction, and traction, as well as basic engineering principles like weight distribution, efficiency, and power transmission—all with the help of Technic pieces. You’ll even learn how Sariel builds his amazing tanks, trucks, and cars to scale. Learn how to: –Build sturdy connections that can withstand serious stress –Re-create specialized LEGO pieces, like casings and u-joints, and build custom, complex Schmidt and Oldham couplings –Create your own differentials, suspensions, transmissions, and steering systems –Pick the right motor for the job and transform it to suit your needs –Combine studfull and studless building styles for a stunning look –Build remote-controlled vehicles, lighting systems, motorized compressors, and pneumatic engines This beautifully illustrated, full-color book will inspire you with ideas for building amazing machines like tanks with suspended treads, supercars, cranes, bulldozers, and much more. What better way to learn engineering principles than to experience them hands-on with LEGO Technic? New in this edition: 13 new building instructions, 13 updated chapters, and 4 brand-new chapters!

Come explore an incredible LEGO® universe in LEGO Space: Building the Future. Spaceships, orbital outposts, and new worlds come to life in this unique vision of the future, built completely from LEGO bricks. A selection of step-by-step building instructions will have you constructing your own cosmic creations to play with at home. Marvel at interstellar battlecruisers, space pirates, charming robots, and other stunning builds from an amazing future!

Build 52 galaxy-hopping LEGO spacecraft that can fit in the palm of your hand! Complete with step-by-step instructions and stunning full-color photography. LEGO Space Projects rocket right past the standard science-fiction tropes, taking you to the edge of galactic design. The models in this book are built for enlightened celestial ambitions, like botanical research, comet mining, solar sailing, and experimental drive testing. Get inspired by real-life spacecraft as you transform a handful of bricks into NASA-grade propulsion systems, heat shields, and solar collectors. Or let your imagination soar as you snap together an explorer mecha with maneuvering thrusters and hypersonic Cloud Skimmer. LEGO fans of all skills and ages will have a blast building dozens of cleverly styled models, from sleek to comical, from retro to futuristic, from space stations to flying saucers—and beyond. Projects range from 8 bricks to 100, and are brought to life by stunning full-color photography, witty descriptions, and detailed technical specs. Build them using the book’s clear, step-by-step instructions, or use the techniques as a launchpad for your own designs!

At last, fans of the LEGO BOOST robot building kit have the learning resource they've been missing! Enter The LEGO BOOST Activity Book: a full-color guide that will help readers learn how to build and code LEGO creations that move, explore their environment, grab and lift objects, and more. The LEGO BOOST kit lets younger builders create fun, multifunctional robots by combining bricks with code, but it doesn't come with a manual. With the help of this complete guide to the LEGO BOOST set, you'll be on your way to building and programming BOOST robots in no time. You'll begin your exploration by building a basic rover robot called MARIO to help you learn the fundamentals of the BOOST programming environment. Next, you'll add features to your rover to control its movement and make it repeat actions and react to colors and sounds. Once you've learned some programming basics, you'll learn how to program your robot to do things like follow lines on the ground, scan its environment to decide where to go, and even play darts. As final projects, you'll create two complete robots: BrickPecker to help you organize your bricks and CYBOT, a robot that talks, shoots objects, and executes voice commands. As you advance through the book, optional lessons aim to deepen your understanding of basic robotics concepts. Brain BOOSter sections let you dig into the math and engineering behind your builds while a host of experiments seek to test your skills and encourage you to do more with your robots. With countless illustrations, extensive explanations, and a wealth of coding examples to guide you, The LEGO BOOST Activity Book is sure to take you from beginning builder to robotics whiz and give your robot-building brain that needed boost!

“Wonderful essays on everything steampunk, written by well-known names in the movement who are living steampunk every day” (Wired.com). Steampunk—a grafting of Victorian aesthetic and punk rock attitude onto various forms of science-fiction culture—is a phenomenon that has come to influence film, literature, art, music, fashion, and more. The Steampunk Bible is the first compendium about the movement, tracing its roots in the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells through its most recent expression in movies such as Sherlock Holmes. Its adherents celebrate the inventor as an artist and hero, re-envisioning and crafting retro technologies including antiquated airships and robots. A burgeoning DIY community has brought a distinctive Victorian-fantasy style to their crafts and art. Steampunk evokes a sense of adventure and discovery, and embraces extinct technologies as a way of talking about the future. This ultimate manual will appeal to aficionados and novices alike as author Jeff VanderMeer takes the reader on a wild ride through the clockwork corridors of Steampunk history. Praise for The Steampunk Bible “An informed, informative and beautifully illustrated survey of the subject.” —The Financial Times “The Steampunk Bible is far and away the most intriguing catalog of all things steam yet written.” —The Austin Chronicle

Steampunk is more than a fandom, a literary genre, or an aesthetic. It is a research methodology turning history inside out to search for alternatives to the progressive technological boosterism sold to us by Silicon Valley. This book turns to steampunk's quirky temporalities to embrace diverse genealogies of the digital humanities and to unite their methodologies with nineteenth-century literature and media archaeology. The result is nineteenth-century digital humanities, a retrofuturist approach in which readings of steampunk novels like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ken Liu's The Grace of Kings collide with nineteenth-century technological histories like Charles Babbage's use of the difference engine to enhance worker productivity and Isabella Bird's spirit photography of alternate history China. Along the way, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities considers steampunk as a public form of digital humanities scholarship and activism, examining projects like Kinetic Steam Works's reconstruction of Henri Giffard's 1852 steam-powered airship, Jake von Slatt's use of James Wimshurst's 1880 designs to create an electric influence machine, and the queer steampunk activism of fans appearing at conventions around the globe. Steampunk as a digital humanities practice of repurposing reacts to the growing sense of multiple non-human temporalities mediating our human histories: microtemporal electricities flowing through our computer circuits, mechanical oscillations marking our work days, geological stratifications and cosmic drifts extending time into the millions and billions of years. Excavating the entangled, anachronistic layers of steampunk practice from video games like Bioshock Infinite to marine trash floating off the shore of Los Angeles and repurposed by media artist Claudio Garzón into steampunk submarines, Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities uncovers the various technological temporalities and multicultural retrofutures illuminating many alternate histories of the digital humanities.