LEGO designer Mike Psiaki shared how LEGO Icons 10365 Captain Jack Sparrow's Pirate Ship's coolest feature got made – and it took a while.
While 10365 Captain Jack Sparrow's Pirate Ship is clearly an impressive display piece, it also includes various play functions that ensure the fun doesn't stop when the build does. Sections of the deck open up to reveal the interior, and the captain's wheel actually turns the rudder, as if it were at sea.
Perhaps the coolest feature of them all, however, is the cannons. They actually extend and retract through panels on the side of the ship at the turn of a dial. Speaking to LEGO Fan Media, LEGO designer Mike Psiaki revealed that this feature actually took the longest to both decide on and design practically.
"The area we went back and forth the most on as a design team was how to implement the cannons," Mike said. "There was talk at the beginning of how cool it would be to put in 16 of the shooting cannons – but there's simply not enough space for it inside the ship.
"If you want to have them deployed, not only is there not enough space, but there's not really a good way to interact with them all. There are a few places where you can open up the deck and get inside, but in order to open up the whole deck and play with those cannons, we would have had to chop the ship into so many different pieces and potentially affect model stability.
"That's when I thought maybe we should look back at 71042 Silent Mary, which was the model that was made for Dead Men Tell No Tales. On that model, Marcos Bessa had these brick-built cannons that he used on the ship, and I took inspiration from that as a starting point for how we could do scratch-built cannons that would work in the model."
Of course, simply deciding to do the cannons and in what form is only half the process. The next step is to put the design into practice – and that also took a big chunk of the design time.
"I built probably 10 or 12 versions of that function to try to make it work," Mike remembered. "There were a lot of different versions for how it would trigger: there was one where you would turn a crate on the deck. The way that I do a lot of development is just through trial and error.
"Because we have so many bricks here, we can build 10 copies of a feature. Instead of trying to theorise about how this would work, we can very easily build 10 different versions and see which one works best and go with that.
"So there was a lot of trial and error to get the cannons to work the way they do, but I think it was worth it. One of the debates we had during the design meetings at the LEGO Group was about whether the cannons actually come out all at the same time on a ship.
"We were scouring the internet to find sources that would support or deny this claim. I eventually found somebody who said that, even though they were pirates, they would probably be well-trained enough to deploy all the guns at the same time. That's how I convinced my coworker that I didn't need to make some staggered mechanism there, which I think probably would have driven me crazy if I tried to do that."
Thankfully, for the sake of Mike's sanity and for the final set, the cannons made it into the final set with a smooth simultaneous mechanims. To see and build it for yourself, you can buy LEGO Icons 10365 Captain Jack Sparrow's Pirate Ship around the world right now for £299.99 / $379.99 / €349.99, along with its exclusive GWP while stocks last.
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