howitzer

Yeah, I remember that, It's a great one though indeed really bulky.

Did I miss something, I thought 42078 was purely manual model...

Very nice! I once wanted to build my own full solar system orrery, but couldn't figure out how to make all of the planets orbit around the same axis so I scrapped the idea... I guess that would become pretty large and complex, perhaps too much so to be doable with Lego.

I kinda understand the worries about misleading title. Would've been cool if this set had been released as a fully motorized flagship-level set or at least partially motorized mid-size set.

The old toothed half-bushes are pretty tight, especially if you arrange them so that the teeth engage too. A bunch of those end-to-end makes the really hard to pull out.

Yeah, but someone buying a diecast wouldn't earn TLG any money, and apparently stuff like 42125 sell pretty well so it's natural for TLG to produce them. For us AFOLs 42125 is of course totally uninteresting as a Technic model with its severe lack of functionality. My hope would be that the licenced sets would have some nice functions rather than the repeated empty shell models we've been getting. On the other hand, some of them include some nice recolours (especially panels) and whatever the case, I don't have to buy it if I don't like it. The upcoming space lineup is already more than enough to fill my buying needs for a long while.

I really, really hope that they haven't designed this set with such enormous flaws, I mean 360 days in a year would be sufficiently close and not that hard to do, and as there's axial tilt of the Earth, I expect it to reflect the seasons correctly.

Indeed, that's also different and while useful in many places, not the same especially when you're trying to fit it in tight spaces or you're in need of perpendicular pinholes.

I feel you. The part you describe would be so useful. Funnily enough, there's this which is sort of the same but still too different to be nearly as useful:

I believe the main problem here is the license. It's obviously very different from its supposed real life counterpart, which kinda begs the question: why have license in the first place if the thing doesn't resemble much the thing it's supposedly modelled after? Well, I guess they had a licence agreement and the folks at John Deere aren't very nitpicky about details...

You're not wrong at all, the at least some part of the marketing is definitely aiming towards people who ordinarily wouldn't be interested in Lego at all - those who are not interested in building their own thing with construction toys, but who could still be tempted to buy Lego out of nostalgia or brand loyalty (with licensed sets) or just to have a cool thing on a shelf. The whole 18+ branding and many of the newer sets (especially Icons line) are aiming exactly at these people, and yes, B-models are meaningless to (most of) them.

I'm sure absolutely everyone with even vaguest familiarity of Lego knows about the rebuildability, but of course B-models give ideas and showcase the possibilities in a way that's hard to do otherwise. But I think this relates to the discontinuation of printed instructions for B-models, rather than discontinuation of B-models themselves. The extra hassle of acquiring the digital instructions and then reading those must have reduced B-model building by a significant amount. Of course the B-models were usually hinted at the A-model instructions (or in the box) but still, I'm sure TLG has run the numbers on downloaded B-model instructions compared to sold sets and drawn conclusions. Of course TLG wants people to buy as much as possible, but the beauty of Lego (as business model) is that while the possibilities are vast and you can do a lot of things even with small amount, you'll end up wanting more. I believe it would be counterproductive for TLG to nudge people to not dismantle and rebuild, because that would lessen their desire to get more to build with - most of the parts end up stored in bins with only a little bit on display at any given time. Having the sets built takes up a lot of space and most people run out of display space much sooner than they run our of storage space.

I'm a bit worried about the scale, as this thing is going to be very large. Hopefully I have enough parts and it won't become too unwieldy to handle as the build progresses. I already did some modifications to the sled in order to make it a bit smaller. Next up is fitting the tracks.

With the recent discontinuation of official B-models there has been a lot of complaints and some people seem to be even considering stopping buying Technic, but personally I don't really know how to feel about the issue. While I appreciate the B-models as a concept, most of the time I have found myself not building them and when I did, the results usually weren't particularly interesting. Some people obviously find the B-models very worthwhile, but I wonder if it's just a loud minority, or is it a sentiment shared by many people here.

As the contest was announced I felt I had tons of ideas but no time to build anything. Still, I had an inspiration about snowmobiles, which are severely under-represented in Technic, and as I had no idea how such a vehicle would actually be built I had to do some research on their inner workings. I found out that the suspension and transmission designs for snowmobiles can be fascinatingly complex and right there in the core of what it means to build Technic. So despite my severe lack of time, I will attempt to build such a vehicle, not based on any particular brand but as a generic representation of what a snowmobile should be and do. One thing apparently most modern snowmobiles have is a continuously variable transmission, which is really hard to replicate in Technic (at least in a manner that can actually transmit some power instead of being just a conceptual demonstration), so I'm not yet sure what to do about that, but meanwhile I started out with the rear sled and its suspension. A few hours of trial and error I ended up with something that seems to do what I wanted it to, as shown here in the photos: