General discussion and archive topic for lost older technic B model instructions

[Auroralampinen]

Thanks for @Ngoc Nguyen to discover this, lego has now removed b model instructions from older technic sets. 

Here is a example

https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/building-instructions/42009

In my opinion this is really sad, and now it seems lego has entered the modern gaming era. Where every game is only online and the game developer can switch off the servers and the game is forever gone:(. 

Luckily some youtuber still have the instructions:). 

 

And, you can link every preserved b model instructions in here so have fun:). 

This will soon turn into a instructions archive:). 

Edited September 22 by Auroralampinen

[everybrickasculpture]

I really hope this is just a mistake and not deliberate.  

[Jay Psi]

 Hopefully this is a rather large error. But given recent developments... 

What reason could TLG have for removing access to extra functionality/playability to their sets? Even if it was for consistency with more recent releases, the end result is owners of these sets now have less than they did at the time of purchase.

A quick search shows that Brickset still hosts B-model instructions, amongst others. Might be worth getting them from there in case they have to take the instructions down.

[anyUser]

2 minutes ago, Jay Psi said:

A quick search shows that Brickset still hosts B-model instructions, amongst others.

Brickset is not hosting instructions. there are only links to the (original) resources. As for the 42009 B-model example: Brickset points towards this location: https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/product.bi.additional.extra.pdf/42009_X_42009 Reach Stacker 1 of 5.pdf
This download startet for me a couple of minutes ago.

 

[msk6003]

Seems like Rebrickable is hosting instructions.

[Auroralampinen]

Well, i did send lego a message about missing instructions lets see what they will say about this:). 

And my expectations are pretty low, but luckily pantasy for example is really good with customer support. And they are really open to any questions, and they will answer pretty much everything. They even give little snippets about their newest yet to released and revealed models to build your excitement if you ask for example the functionality about the yet to be released and revealed model:). 

[Kostq]

On a side note - 42009's instructions were low-res before when I built it. Now they're not.
Maybe they're hi-res-ing all older instructions. I'll check out and edit this further...

https://www.lego.com/en-us/search?q=9398 - this is not working too.

Edited September 23 by Kostq

[Auroralampinen]

2 minutes ago, Kostq said:

On a side note - 42009's instructions were low-res before when I built it. Now they're not.
Maybe they're hi-res-ing all older instructions. I'll check out and edit this further...

https://www.lego.com/en-us/search?q=9398 - this is not working too.

For me the 9398 works

https://www.lego.com/en-us/service/building-instructions/9398

[Ngoc Nguyen]

1 hour ago, Kostq said:

Maybe they're hi-res-ing all older instructions. I'll check out and edit this further...

Instructions for B model have always been digital so they have always been hi-res.

[J159753]

1 hour ago, Ngoc Nguyen said:

Instructions for B model have always been digital so they have always been hi-res.

Not exactly, I'm afraid. Although all the different digital building tools for technic are essentially 3D CAD tools that internally manipulate vector models of Lego bricks, they ALL, very frustratingly, output to PDF as raster/bitmap images, rather than as vectors. This would make sense for rendered scenes with complicated lighting, shading, reflections, texturing, etc. But it makes no sense at all (other than lack of time on the part of the programmers) for PDF output. Which means the file sizes are WAY bigger than they need to be, and quality is far worse than it need be. This is an bitmap saved from the 9398 instructions above (last page of 1st book). I haven't processed it in any way or screenshotted it: it's directly extracted from the PDF, where it states it's at 72.093dpi - far from high-res.

If I zoom in on the cogs centre-right, without any image enhancement, this is what's in the image:

Our eyes are miraculously good at extrapolating detail from small images, but when we zoom in we see how much we were intuiting rather than actually seeing. I don't have these paper instructions, but looking at others I'd guess they're rendered at 1200dpi or more [300dpi is more than good enough for continuous tone images like photos, but these are technical illustrations with lots of sharp diagonal lines - even rasterised at 600dpi they'd look bumpy when printed at high-resolution]. But a 1200dpi image is 278 times bigger than a 72dpi image before compression [ (1200/72)^2 ], Even just raising the resolution of these instructions from 72 to 100 dpi would roughly double the file size...

If these were saved as vector data they'd be as sharp as the output device (screen or printer) allowed whatever the zoom level, and at far smaller file size. One day Studio will offer this, I hope...

 

[Auroralampinen]

Ok, lego did respond and they gave links which did go to rebrickable page for the b model instructions. This is really interesting that now rebrickable is the only offical source for the model instructions:). 

Edited September 23 by Auroralampinen