howitzer

This is the best one for today!

Yeah, being long and thin, those axles bend really easily. Maybe you could build a sort of "cage" for it from Technic bricks and some plates and leave it there for a while. Won't come out perfectly straight, but maybe a little straighter. Heating and bending will get you either better results or destroyed part.

I always admire the walking machines that people create from Lego, as those seem to be really hard to make work well and when successful, they're really cool. Nice work!

Yeah, I'm sure the motor will make the gears to skip rather than stall the motor, but I wonder if the motor could be controlled in such a way that it would stop after turning far enough in either direction even if the turn button is pressed, and then return to center when it's released? That way you could have a return to center steering and use normal gears.

Oh, I totally missed that one, thanks for pointing it out! As for the car itself, the chassis looks nice and simple, with very effective solutions on drive & steer. Though I wonder about that clutch gear, wouldn't a normal 24T gear work as well, considering that you can precisely control the PU motors? And if the wheels go out of sync due to the clutch, steering won't work correctly unless it's calibrated again.

I think it would be great if parts that are used for exteriors like liftarms and panels were available with complete palette in "standard" colours, though adding new parts and colours would make this inventory of "standard" exterior colours exponentially larger, so it may not be feasible in the long run. Having few parts in weird colours isn't that exceptional though, they have obviously been made for a specific set, with no intention of expanding that palette further, for example the silver/golden panels of Technic Star Wars sets 20 years ago. I consider those as nothing more than a curiosity, never expecting them to show up in large enough variety to be useful. What I find more annoying is that some colours come in wide-ish but incomplete parts palette, for example purple. Enough parts to make it tempting but not enough to make it easily useful. By the way, surely you mean something else than 7L liftarms, as those are available both as thick and thin variants? I also hope that competition from Cada will force TLG to rethink some aspects of the Technic line - most importantly the minimally functional empty shell sets, which should be discontinued and replaced with some properly functional ones.

More photos would indeed be appreciated. I like the use of some parts, particularly the new panels for headrests and links for A-pillars.

I'm sure both TLG and Cada employ skilled people who make the calculations of how much it would cost to introduce this proposed new part and then decide if it's worth the expense. The question is less "will this new part be the last straw that breaks the camel's back" and more "death by thousand cuts" where no single new part is in itself big deal, but rather every new part adds to the total cost and unless they also increase sales proportionally, they're not worth it. It's a hard calculation and it's widely known that TLG has made some serious mistakes with it in the past, and I'm sure high-ups at Cada don't want to make the same mistakes.

Both, minimum and maximum volume boxes. With difference of 1 stud. Who can make the best box?

I'm in no way involved with Cada, but my guess is that they too have to justify the new parts from a financial point of view, same as TLG. Every new mould has a cost involved, and if the parts palette grows ever larger, the logistics of handling it all makes the cost of the whole operation ever larger. I think it's prudent of Cada to stick mostly to the tried-and-true parts that TLG also makes, while introducing here and there few new parts that they feel would enhance building experience greatly. Flipflop beams are one such part and there's few others, but adding stuff like even-length liftarms and thin liftarms in every length and other such series of parts will make the logistics unmanageable.

Thanks for the review! I had considered buying the book before but kinda forgot about it, but now my interest is renewed!

My guess would be ATAT rings, assuming the scale is somewhere around the rumoured one.

Pros will always have an advantage over more casual builders, that's the basic nature of contests.

Volume limits need to take into account possible protruding functions, is a mobile crane entry eligible when deployed for lifting?

It should not happen immediately though, at least if the arm isn't heavily loaded. I've had the 42128 sitting on my shelf with boom up for months now, with no movement downwards, but it doesn't have much load either. Anyway, I understand that the first release of Arocs had also the pump with cracking base, so it would cause leaks. I have two of those, and it's really annoying though I haven't bothered to buy new ones either...

In some ways the TLG's method of designing sets in-house probably stems from old company culture (which surely must have room for improvement), but I wonder how much of it is forced by the economics and logistics of TLG's operation? I mean, TLG is a huge company, making a huge number of products, and managing all that requires an extremely streamlined process. There might simply not be place for stuff like submitted MOCs to enter that process, as each set produced requires its overhead and affects the production of the other stuff they make. Smaller companies like CaDA can be much more agile, but on the other hand, you don't see CaDA brand stores in every major city all around the world and an aisle of CaDA products in every major department store. While they can keep this up for now, I wonder how long can it last if the company keeps growing?

Just a guess, but I assume they have outsourced the springs and there might be a supply problem with the old type of spring, so they've switched to another kind, which has the same strength but looks different.

Printing errors can happen, one set I have had instructions with some pages misaligned pages so that part of the page was missing. I got new instructions booklet without issue from customer service though.

I don't like the looks of that one, looks way too busy and the lines are poorly defined. Might look slightly better without the stickers, but not that much. The brick-built headlights are nice but other than that, I like the 42125 more, at least as far as looks is concerned.

Kinda bummer if in addition to the collective control the rotor tilts instead of proper cyclic control, but I guess that's still better than any previous Lego helicopter...

Quite a many Technic sets actually have Technic bricks also nowdays, but usually only a couple. They are commonly used for attaching System-built decorations, and sometimes for their greater rigidity than beams (for example in the boom of 42082). Smaller sets tend to not have any though.

Yeah, well, I don't really complain as long as a) proper Technic sets keep getting released and b) they introduce nice new parts with these empty shells.

I, for one, vote with my wallet and won't buy these empty shell-shelf queens. But I will buy sets that I think are proper Technic, like the Tow truck and the new ATV. The empty shell-sets like the McLaren often contain new interesting parts, but in those cases I buy the new parts from B&P or Bricklink, as that way I'll get exactly what I want and nothing else. I advise others to do the same - buy only sets that you think are genuinely good, and if you only want specific parts, get them elsewhere.

Me neither. But one can hope!

I only hope that if they redesign the dumb battery box, they'd add also more ports to it, so that it could run more motors. They wouldn't even need to have separate switches, something like 2+2 would be fine.