Some builders spend months on a single massive creation. Others — the ones who really know what they’re doing — pack everything into a footprint you can hold in your palm. Oscar Cederwall (o0ger) is firmly in the second camp, and his Pular NXE VTOL Shuttle is the kind of microscale work that makes you stare at your own brick collection and wonder what you’ve been wasting your time on.
The premise is pure sci-fi pragmatism: a workhorse colonial shuttle, modular by design, capable of hauling cargo or passengers depending on the mission. Bortomsol’s Beyond Sol universe gets a new utility craft, and Cederwall builds it like someone who actually understands spacecraft engineering — not just someone stacking plates until it looks right.
Let’s talk technique. The hull is a masterclass in SNOT building — Studs Not On Top — with large red panels smooth-facing outward while the structural work hides underneath. That swooping fuselage profile? Achieved with inverted slopes and tiles, not brute-force stacking. The result is a silhouette that reads as a real vehicle at a glance, not a lumpy approximation of one. This is where most microscale builds fall apart — Cederwall doesn’t give you that problem.
The greebling is deliberate and controlled. Exposed studs appear as panel rivets and body details, not as accidental leftovers from honest building. A long barrel turret extends from the starboard side on what looks like a bar or rod element — clean, sturdy, and proportioned right. The cockpit uses a clear/trans element to house a green round tile (a sensor or indicator light, depending on your lore preference) that breaks up the red-on-red surface without disrupting the color discipline.
Then there’s the landing gear. Cederwall mentioned in his Flickr notes that he’s particularly pleased with how these turned out — and you can see why. Small clip-based feet attach underneath using what’s likely a 1×1 round plate in an unusual connection. “It might even be a legal connection,” he jokes. Given LEGO’s own tolerance windows, that’s a hill he’s apparently willing to stand on, and honestly, that’s the kind of detail obsession that separates a good MOC from a great one.
The color story is worth calling out separately. Red dominates — dark red, bright red, a few strategic black underlayers — anchored by gold accent banding around the mid-fuselage spine and printed (or stickered) E12 markings in white. Yellow-black hazard stripes appear on the lower hull. This is a disciplined palette: three colors doing real work, no color spaghetti. In microscale, that restraint is everything. When your build is only 10–14 centimeters long, every hue is magnified.
Cederwall rebuilt this one from a 2018 original, which tells you something: he cared enough about the design to come back to it, refine it, and get the details right this time. That’s a sign of a builder who treats MOCs like drafts — always another pass to make it cleaner, tighter, more resolved. Given he’s got 661 photos on Flickr of mostly sci-fi MOCs with occasional architectural detours, this isn’t idle tinkering. It’s a consistent practice.
If you’re into the Beyond Sol collaborative world-building project — or just want to see what microscale spacecraft looks like when someone really knows what they’re doing — the full build is on his Flickr. This one earns its place in the colonial fleet.
Build by Oscar Cederwall (o0ger) on Flickr.
