Play to Trade (LEGO sailing-ship)

    Kids love playing stories and also loves to play on adult characters. So, If we can put playing stories and playing 'Adult things' together, we can call it Play to Learn. I tryied to put this Idea into my project Play to Trade:

 LEGO® create a lot of ships with bloodthirty pirates and I love this sets very much! The seas were full of big sailing-ships in that old age. And merchant ships were one kind of them. Ships carrying valuable fabric, spices and gold nuggets in their bulky hulls. Courageous crew crossed the ocean and trade with the most interesting commodities from newly discovered continents. That is what I would like to bring back to everyone. Please follow my project on LEGO Ideas website.

 Play - Basic design of the ship was formed from Germany model Flaute Derfflinger (16th century). And I reformed It into simply playable LEGO set with cool functional details. Ship has spacious decks and accessible cabins. There are a lot of canons because keep an eye on the ship is task for every captain and hunting pirates are always nearby.

 Trade - The Idea is wake up children's interest by trading, counting and thinking about weight of freight. The hull can be filled up with five of big chests and young trader's mission will be split up different weight of this chests evenly. Set will include functional weighing-machine and book of correct variants for freight. But Kid's fantasy could not be stopped by any book and they can found uncountably combinations by filling the chests from their own brick collection.

 Balancing mechanism - finding the center of gravity: Each set of five boxes with different weight has 120 combinations of placing but only a few of them ensure the right balance in the ship's hull. The ship should not be too tilt to starboard or larboard!
With the help of a simple equation kids can find out the correct weight for of each box.

Center of gravity in the ship

Example with fixed values 

 The model was set together in LEGO Digital Designer and include over 1350 bricks (Official set 4195 include 1095 bricks; 70413 - 745; 6286 - 912 or 71042 - 2245 bricks).
Unfortunately I can not build the sails, rigging or rope-ladders.
Seven minifigures are there, one shark and one seagull.
Seven chests 6x4
Functional weighing-machine

 Few more details:

Rigging

Cannons

Weight-machine

Bellow deck

Windings anchore

Port - market place

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www.petrmodelships.cz

www.ideas.lego.com