Newest Ship In The Navy

A new ship is set to join the US Navy. The aircraft carrier Harry S Truman. No, not the aircraft carrier that joined the fleet in 1998. The all new, improved and miniaturized Harry S Truman. Oh, and it happens to be built entirely out of Lego blocks.

300,000 or so Lego blocks.

The real thing is one of the largest ships afloat - and this amazing copy is the biggest one ever made out of Lego.

Father-of-two Malle Hawking, 36, used more than 300,000 lego bricks to build his scale model of the USS Harry S Truman from scratch.

The Harry S Truman is one of the largest carriers in the US fleet. The full size nuclear powered aircraft carrier carries 85 warplanes and more than 5000 airmen and crew.

Hawking's scaled down version is the same down to the smallest detail, and took him more than a year to build.

The IT Consultant from Munich, Germany, said: "I used to play and build Lego models when I was a boy, all my friends did.

"I stopped building in my teens, but in February 2005 almost 20 years after my so called Dark Ages began when I did not have any Lego for 20 years, I watched a documentary about Aircraft Carriers.

"I was so inspired I ran down to the cellar, poured my two boxes of Lego on to the floor and immediately started trying to build one of my own." Using pictures from the internet, he tried to copy the Harry S Truman over and over again until he got it right.

He did get it right, too. They have pictures. Here are the photos Hawking posted on Brickshelf.com. Hawking is actually going to take his ship to visit the real Truman, incidentally.