Enigma-85

Personally, I find the 7184 Trade Federation Multi-Troop Transport set to be... weird. I realise that the early Lego Star Wars sets were somewhat primitive compared to those found today, but this is really one of the least accurate recreations of all. It looks absolutely nothing like its on-screen muse! And what's with all the grey?

A lot of LEGO City MOCs tend to go for extravagant, quaint, or classical external designs, which are fantastic but not particularly realistic. I mean, in my town there are no Roman columns, Gothic arches, thatched roofs, or anything of that sort... just big, largely plain, square buildings, built from concrete or bricks as cheaply as possible. I think you've captured that brilliantly (if yellowly... is that a word? Tis now) with this set, and I'd actually be interested to see somebody build an entire town in a more realistic style like this. Urban decay in LEGO form! As for the innards... just wow.

You really love your minis, don't you? These are fantastic. Your TIE Interceptor replaces my previous favourite from your minis, the Lucrehulk; it's awesome.

I quite like the Walker actually, non-canon though it may be. It's a nice 'filler' for an army. You don't get armies made up entirely of infantry and main battle tanks, after all - you need a whole bunch of armed Humvees in there too. That's how I look at the Walker, anyway, and the back seat is just space for a regular trooper to fire off a few blaster rounds as they rampage around the battlefield. Unfortunately, I can't walk past one of these without buying one. I have always preferred Phase I Clone Trooper armour to the Phase II armour (I don't know why), and the fact that these are some of the best minifigs ever only makes it harder to resist. These clones are remarkably detailed for 'generic' minifigs. Some of the major characters' minifigs haven't enjoyed so much attention to detail compared to these guys! Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Republic Gunship, for example, may as well be an M-Tron figure when stood next to one of these dudes.

My god... finally, a ship that surpasses the Barracuda in all ways! That thing is just... superb! There's no other word to describe it. It actually looks like a real ship for once!

For the last ten years or so I've had the notion that the old space simulation game Starlancer would have great LEGO possibilities, with all the fighters, carriers, asteroid bases and whatnot, but... the strike carriers in that game were portrayed as being huge, and making them on the System scale, with minifigs in the cockpits of the fighters and all that, would either go the way of the Star Wars Star Destroyer sets (i.e. completely out-of-scale), or would be prohibitively expensive even for the die hards. I might attempt the ANS Reliant myself once I've rebuilt my LEGO collection a little. Failing that, of course, Back to the Future is a good 'un. The DeLorian would become a must-have set instantly, and there are plenty of other sets to be made from that trilogy. It also fits in with LEGO's 'non-violent' preference. And if Star Wars gets the LEGO treatment, why not Star Trek? Presumably 'cause the Enterprise is too structurally unsound to make a large LEGO model out of...

Risqué! Wolf whistles go out to Miss November, what a doll!

I have never owned anything by Megabloks, so I can't comment. Just looking at photographs of their standard bricks compared to LEGO equivalents gives some indication as to their overall quality, however - they appear visibly poorer. I could be wrong, of course, as I'd need to hold one, but... Anyway, I wonder what TLC would have come up with had they earned the Halo licence instead of MB. Looking at the MB website they seem to have covered all of the bases, though a lot of the pieces look somewhat specialised.

Cheers guys. It's good to know I don't have to rush so much at least, I don't think my wallet could take it. I'll have to hit Brickipedia and figure out the release dates on the sets I want to get then, to see how long I've got...

I'm not long out of the so-called Dark Ages, so I don't know exactly what happens when LEGO releases new sets in the new year. Firstly, I assume they'll release the lauded 2010 lines early in the new year? Secondly, what happens to the 'current' sets after they're released? Will they continue to be produced until ultimately phased out, or will production simply cease entirely? And, as somebody who's currently sporting a rather limited collection after a couple of months (Republic Gunship, Droid Gunship, Clone Walker Battle Pack and Hailfire Droid...), will this be a good time to bring in reinforcements, what with sales and suchlike, or will prices on remaining stock stay static or, god forbid, even rise? To put it simply, should I be hurrying up and buying up every set I can find for fear of missing out and being stuck with the inflated prices of eBay (handy for the odd part for sure, but not so good for the bigger, rarer things), or am I best off waiting for a while? My apologies if this is a daft question, if this is the wrong place to ask, or if the answer is staring me straight in the eyes already.

How long does LEGO still hold the rights to producing Star Wars sets, though? I'm assuming they'll renew again anyway, but if they don't, they might miss that series entirely!

As a kid I somewhat lost interest in the Space them with the introduction of the Ice Planet line (the trans-orange parts made me think of Tango), so I sort-of stopped getting them after that - which was only a year or so before I stopped playing with LEGO altogether. So I can't really comment on the lines after that. But of the ones I did have, the Space Police I Striker was amongst my favourites (and it's one of only two Space sets I owned that survived my teenage car boot sale binge), not only because of its fearsome, streamlined look but its swooshing ability. I had the larger Mission Commander set, but you just couldn't fly that around as much. Second to that, I suppose, would be the Spyrius Robo-Guardian, one of the last sets I bought and also the only other Space set to survive to this day. I typically placed that dude into the 'OMG unstoppable killing machine!!1' role during play (with the little Android minifig being akin to the Terminator), requiring all the other minifigs from the other sets to team up to take it down. I also had a couple of other Spyrius sets, including the smaller robot, which would occasionally arrive as reinforcements to make epic battles even more epic. Sets (and unfortunate minifigs) would often need to be rebuilt afterwards. Fond memories... He's since found use as an unknown alien antagonist of the Galactic Republic in my shelf-mounted display, incidentally.

Hmm, let's see... regular paycheque, cleaner working conditions, nicer clothes, less chance of a random brawl involving blades being plunged into chests, and... perhaps... some sort of union? I think I'd go for the Imperial Navy over the scurvy-infested ragamuffins of the piratical organisations. Call me soft, but I like clean clothes in the morning!

Well that's pretty bad, they shouldn't wear off after such a short time no matter what you're doing with them (well, unless you were intentionally stripping the decals off, in which case yeah they should disappear in a short time, but I'm assuming you're not doing that!). My old Roger Redbeard, from the first Pirates sets, has seen his dazzling gold adornments fade a little over the last twenty years, but that's pretty impressive. This... this is poor. It's sad to see the quality dwindle so much after all those years of greatness.

The whole base is impressive, but those doors are the pièce de résistance for me. They look so authentic and the movement is so fluid and perfectly timed. Stroke of genius you had there!