JimDude

Eurobricks Vassals
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Posts posted by JimDude

  2. Posted

    15 hours ago, Maaboo35 said:

    I wouldn't mind if all axles were black again. I mean, the classic manuals all tell you which length is which.

    I think many people underestimate the amount of kids (and maybe even AFOLs) that build digitally, even for the A-model. For the B-model, we don't even have the choice.

    And without a  1-on-1 representation on paper, colour-coding has appeared to be the next best thing. I don't ~like~ it, but TBH, I don't mind either.

  3. Posted · Edited by JimDude
    formatting

    1 hour ago, AVCampos said:

    Being able to carry stuff uphill without spilling the contents 

    That can't be it. If you tilt the truck - by driving it uphill - until the bed is horizontal, then the center of the bed is resting directly above the rear axle. Which is of course bad for more than one reason. It would also be quite the hill (we're talking about approx. a 30* angle give or take a few degrees), and there's no way a wheeled vehicle would be useful for that, especially in area's where this type of vehicle is typically deployed (read: in mud).

     

    1 hour ago, AVCampos said:

    [M]aybe it's to be able to "take a dump from high ground": 

    Well, that could work in theory, but as you can see, the angle of the bed when tipping it over is not sufficient to let anything - other than LEGO :) - slide out. Then there's the issue of the pile of dirt that you'd want to dump on top of blocking the rear wheels. You can't back up far enough to have the bed empty on top of the previous pile.

    I'm ~sure~ I'm giving this way too much thought :D.  Maybe there's a EuroVolvo forum out there where this would be more appropriate…

  4. Posted

    The movie of the B-model clearly shows that the bed cannot possibly empty itself (*) when the model is in short-wheel-base, as I feared earlier up in the thread. Again this is not a dig against LEGO, because I still think this set, actually both its models, are beyond cool.

    It's more of a "dig" against VOLVO. I literally cannot think of a use for this feature, and yet, there it is.

    I'm sure I'll be feeling very stupid when VOLVO eventually explains it all.

    Also gotta love in the movie how you can briefly see the adult/dad swoosh the drone out of its' docking station. They make the scene last for a microsecond, and you actually only see his hand, almost as if it's not supposed to happen, but it's there all right and we all know that's exactly what we'll be doing ourselves :) (Well, technically, not me, as I won't be getting this set due to owning 42030 already).

     

    (*) I mean in real life - I'm sure a LEGO payload will roll out just fine :)

  6. Posted · Edited by JimDude
    link added

    31 minutes ago, Ngoc Nguyen said:

    Maybe there aren't enough flat panels to make a longer bed.

    If so, they could have gone for a wire-frame bed as they did for the B-model of 42030. We must assume this is modeled after the real thing from VOLVO (well, in as far as a prototype can be real of course), so it's the real thing that'll be tooling around with all that wasted space.

    Here's a Komatsu showing what I mean about wasted space: the bed spans the entire vehicle: https://www.franceroutes.fr/actualites/ne-manquerait-il-pas-quelque-chose/

  8. Posted

    I totally don't understand the B-model either (I mean the actual thing from VOLVO, not LEGO's interpretation, which is most likely spot on).

    When shortening the wheel-base, the bed tilts forward, thus reducing its' capacity, which is rather silly. It will also take longer to empty. Does it actually even tip far enough to properly empty itself when in 'short-wheelbase-mode'?

    I also don't understand why something autonomous still has space for a cabin. That's a lot of wasted space that could have been taken by a bigger bed, or the total truck could have been smaller in itself. Maybe the real thing is supposed to have a removable cabin, so that non-auto mode is still an option. There's footage on Youtube of a futuristic excavator by VOLVO which does have a removable cabin (though in that case it is to protect the operator from hazardous materials being dug up, and not so much to let it operate autonomously).

    All that said and done, I ~really~ like both models, especially when I channel my inner 7-year old self (which isn't hard; it's the pretending to be an adult which I find hard :lol: ). Won't be getting it though, since I already have 42030. Which I'll keep assembled for at least another year, just so the son - the actual 7-year old in the house - doesn't get the brilliant idea to ask Santa for 42081 :).

     

  9. Posted · Edited by JimDude

    14 hours ago, Erik Leppen said:

    They don't look like the real thing, but I think they look fairly convincing and stable. It remains to be seen how strong they are though.

    There's 'light' - or rather a lack of shade - under the left rear wheel. The picture suggests this thing is resting on its outriggers (albeit only for a millimeter or two),

    (EDIT: some of the bracing on the outriggers also suggests 'heavy duty' - wait and see I suppose)

  10. Posted

    As was evident from my last post, I am a staunch defender in favor of TLGs decision to colour code stuff as wildly extensively as they're colour coding it now, even though I may personally regret it a little bit under the full realisation I've reached that conclusion with my rose-tinted glasses-on-the-past on.

    That said, the lime beam in the Chiron is mindboggling.

    Except that it's not.

    It has me convinced that research on the Porsche has shown that this type of set is hot with non-LEGO builders. I mean people, adults mostly, who'd never even think about buying LEGO, let alone going ahead with it, but do make an exception to get sets of 'cool cars' (as an aside, I'm sure it also happened to the Apollo rocket for example, which is not surprisingly totally off the colour coding scales). These buyers don't even care that it's made out of LEGO, but TLG will have to make sure that they too are able to build these things. And they're even 'worse' than kids from the regular target audience, because they're not building for the challenge of building, and certainly not for the sake of building LEGO in itself; they're building to get their display piece done.

  12. Posted · Edited by JimDude

    15 minutes ago, Frequenzberater said:

    I wonder if there is a unique function and would it could be.

    The rear wing can be lowered/raised (if not, it would have been visible in the front view), and by the looks of it it'll rotate too (for the air-brake function). It of course remains to be seen how 'automated' this will be.

    [EDIT] The high-res pic I just saw shows two blue  3L and two black 2L pins, i.e. all friction pins, which would facilitate tilting of the wing. That would make it 'pose-able', not 'movable'. Oh well. And besides, it's not as if I have ever gotten anything right from looking at leaks/prelims :)

  13. Posted

    As one poster pointed out, there's more than one definition to 'Colour Vomit', but I think we can all agree that the first definition was about releasing different coloured axles and pins for different lengths/functions. This post wiil be about that definition (after all, the rest is personal taste which can never be up to debate - I personally LOVE the forest harvester colour scheme, even though the set itself does nothing for me).

    I used to be in the "LEGO has gone too far" camp, but here's the thing I was missing:

    Many of the old sets that we AFOLs fawn about (yes, 8880 and 8480, I'm looking at ~you~), and sometimes even brag about having been able to build it without help from our parents (*), only had about 1000 pieces. OK, technically, the supercar had 1300, but many of those were system parts for the seats and bodyliines etc (in fact it could be argued that much of Technic back then was based on system bricks, such as a plethora of plates in all shapes and sizes, used to connect the studded beams).

    Sets these days are often ~3000 pieces. The Arocs, a benchmark to many AFOLs, had 2800 pieces. The Rough Terrain Crane (which is looking more and more like it'll become the new benchmark for many builders) has what, 4000 pieces? And then there's the Bucket Wheel Excavator… That's 3 to 5 times more pieces, and many of them are no longer 'easy to identify' System, but in stead are mostly pins, slightly different pins, oh, and even more slightly more different pins.

    So I think it is very unfair to claim that "kids these days" do not have the attention span we ourselves did when we were kids. We're actually expecting them to have 3 to 5 times our attention span of the (g)olden days, due to the sheer size of the sets, and that's not even taking into account that many of the pieces have become more difficult to identity (let's be honest here: a common complaint is that sets have too many pins - imagine if they all looked the same). Let's be even more honest: didn't we all brag (**) about being able to identify an 8-long from a 10-long axle by hard? Or a 10-long from a 12-long? Try as I might, I couldn't tell a 9-long from a 10-long today if it weren't for the colour coding. Of course, I could use the guide in the Building Instructions, but it's a new world today: kids build with a tablet as guide. They actually have to for the B-models.

    Of course, there are still the smaller sets where the above doesn't really apply, but do we really expect LEGO to add pins/axles in Yet Another Colour - this time more neutral - to the smaller sets? And more importantly, kids to cope with ~that~ as well?

    That said, the complete LHS suspension setup in red and the complete RHS suspension setup in blue on the 42070 (or whatever the actual colours were) ~is~ a step too far in my book, but then again: a) that set is a train wreck to begin with, and b) ironically, when Jim built it, he still managed to swap the sides (and yes, his excuse(s) were solid, but remember this is supposed to be assembled by kids).

     

    (*) I get to call this out and be critical about it, because I used to be like this myself. In fact, while I was still a CFOL in the '80s, I had many LEGO building friends and we had many shared building sessions, but many friends didn't "do" Technic because they found it too complicated.

    (**) I get to call this out and … x2

  14. Posted

    We already saw the patent for the 'rotatable' remote - up/down could become left/right - so it's got to be real. It also does away with the tiny dipswitches of the old remote because up/down can also become down/up by rotating 180*.

    The illustration in the patent was beyond stupid though, since it showed a rectangular unit as opposed to a square unit, so rotating would mess up the shape. Luckily the real thing is squared.

    (OK, technically, it's circular within a square container, but I digress)

  17. Posted

    In the Chiron thread, @Jim mentioned he has his Porsche in a display case. Rather than taking that thread off-topic, I'm diverting here to ask the obvious questions: "What display case? Where'd you get it? Got any pics? Was it as cheap as we all hope it'll be? Are you willing to trade it for a pack of peanuts that's only a month over date? It's one of those Duyvis packs so if you want I could open it for you, coz we've got one of those iron plate cutters at work which might be able to do the job".

    OK, maybe not ALL questions were as obvious as I initially thought. And yes, I did cut myself last night while opening a pack of nuts. It was nuts, I tell ya.

  18. Posted

    I wonder if Eric is the only person in the world to have all Technic sets from 1977->2016. I mean other than LEGO themselves, but then again, they're not a person :).

    It would be sad to see that collection being broken up. So, maybe he could be persuaded to 'only' sell the MOCs (which should be easier to sell to begin with), giving him the literal and figurative breathing room to hold on to the 'official' collection for a bit longer.

  20. Posted

    3 hours ago, Jim said:

    This pretty much sums it up. At least, that is what they did with the Porsche. Maybe they will surprise us with the Chiron.

    People keep forgetting that it was actually Porsche who stripped technical stuff from the Porsche (4-wheel steering, who knows what else), not LEGO themselves.

    The end-result is the same though, so you could argue it doesn't actually matter.

     

    I do have a 'problem' already with the Chiron. It is totally different from a 911 (even the GT3) from a car-market perspective, so they're off to a weird start for a series of collectable cars. I'm just not seeing a shelf with both cars side by side, and then an onlooker still going: "Wow, will you just look at that Porsche!".

  21. Posted

    I don't really know where to put this, since it does relate to 2017, but not necessarily to a set, but I'll still take my chances here.

    For the 40th anniversary of Technic, we were promised (or rather: "Jim was told be a LEGO employee" :) ) that 'there is more to come'. I believe we got that promise AFTER the special brick and after the chassis-car plans (made up of H1 sets).

    Did we ever find out what that was? Some put forward the notion that the visit to the vault was the missing treat, but has this ever been confirmed?

  25. Posted

    A Belgian (web)shop has the 42070 currently on promo for EUR 188: http://www.vatana.eu/lego-lego-6x6-allterain-sleepwagen_multi_123011.html

    But wait, it gets better. They've started the Saint Nicholas promotion, which gives vouchers for each purchase above a certain threshold (*). For the 42070 you end up getting EUR 30 in vouchers. Of course that's VIP-point money that you have to spend in the same shop, but still, EUR 158 for the '70 is starting to sound right.

    Hopefully my son doesn't want one for Saint Nicholas, because I've now ran out of counter-arguments :lol:


    (*) I'm ~guessing~ not online, though…