Col. Whipstick

*DRULE* *wub*

Didn't know quite where to put this but I thought it may be of some interest to you all... Eldorado fortress I've often argued is spelt wrong and that it should be written El Dorado. Given the legends regarding El Dorado by the conquistadors I always thought it was meant to be a fabled city of gold created by the Inca or another Andean civilization that belonged to myth as it were and born out of Spanish gold lust. I've just done a translation into English and El Dorado comes out as 'the gilded one'... this obviously has some mystical protents regarding gilded/gold, incarnation of the sun god-gold etc but the point is it's refference may imply more in the way of a person than a place. Just thought it an interesting bit of information regarding our El Dorado fortress and perhaps some story could be evolved from it.

Good to see all us descreet redcoats are finally rallying here... this forum has been way too dominated by the continentals (both sides of the Atlantic), time to remind all these blues who really runs the show. :-P

On me the Empire! Redcoats ofcourse... though I have equal numbers of both. Would now be a good time to throw a spanner into the works and advocate my imperial greens :-P

IMP! IMP! GO BABY GO! Though I shall always affectionately reffer to her as Port Royal, guess I had the alternative name books with my sets. *sweet*

I made that suggestion about the ninjas overlaying as well as the oriental indians and chinese from the johnny thunder series with the southern africa idea but no one seemed interested in either suggestion. Read from the beginning of the thread and you'll see it mentioned, going beyond the Caribbean gives us loads of crossovers

I don't know if this is still worth posting in but on the subject of Dutch Imperial troops I scowered the internet high and low and battled to find uniforms specifically for the Dutch and/or their colonial forces, I did however find this photo on a website that suggest some sort of colonial theme park somewhere or other and they guy's wife is posing dressed in period clothes amoungst some employees who are apparently 'Dutch soldiers' and the uniform looks like what we may have spoken about. http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?i=2802644

I'm not saying who I voted for *whispers to the member concerned... I'll take cheque by the way* I'm amazed at how close those polls look to me at the time of my vote and it was a tough choice. A lot of great MOC's! I thought it amusing the pirates +4, those things are bloody scary! Well that's my two cents, best of luck to everyone that entered! *sweet*

Dirt isn't half the enemy that sunlight is... My lego models were out on display for some time and as a kid I lived in South Africa and the sunlight got through the windows and buggered up all the white bricks pretty bad, the white on the mini-figs seems to have stayed okay but the imperial flags and white bricks need replacing as does a couple of the blue boards for some reason. Just thought I'd make a point of warning you all about where you display your stuff though the sun in Europe or North America usually isn't as deadly.

I can't believe some of you are entertaining buying this crap! If you wanna save money buy no name brand jeans or save more coupons but lego is sacred and pirate lego even more so. A knock off is a knock off, no matter how good it looks or cheap it appears I'd still have issues knowing this thing isn't the real deal. Maybe some of the cheap bricks could be useful as spares but that set as it stands belongs in the trash!

Hot Tomali... What a lot of work! I'm sure they'll fetch a fair price and if you've mapped the tiles you could always try manufacture them again for the next event. *y*

Yeah, lego seemed to catch on after the early years that repetition of the figure design wasn't so applicable to pirates as to imperials. All the later years newer figure combinations and torso designs began to branch out some. As always there's a lack of female designs however though most the maidens from castle will fit in nicely, pity I only have that old witch. lol

Captain Ironhook needs a shower! :-P

I like the contrast of the red and white buildings against the grey wall fortifications and with trains it's a bit like it's an old outpost that has been revived into a new and enterprising little colony. Did anyone else pic up on the MOC styled horse? Inventive! So where and when would you place this settlement in history, do you have some ideas about a background story? I certainly like that you've pushed the pirate stuff into the 19th century with trains as there's no reason why everything should always stay in 'the golden age'

Yeah, I'd imagine they would, the end days showed how they were moving away from the Napoleanic era and more towards the Golden Age with the conquistadors. We could go beserk making yellow, purple, black, white, orange, teal imperials but I thought Green the most likely 3rd option. It would be nice if we could all agree on a certain colour coding to define exact nations.

It's interesting to see a dock that's built up from the sea, we always tend to have them low-lying. The island fortress would be my fav, it has a kinda more boxy mediterranean feel and given the troops look British it could be somewhere like Malta.

Well I wasn't expecting the suggestion of Russian... Dutch would work with orange epaulettes, then again some might say those were Irish Republican troops. lol So get hold of a copy of Birds of Prey yet? Should be printed in Dutch.

These sets can't really belong to any fraction I feel. I suppose you could always say that in a set of say 5 with 3 pirates and 2 imperials that the set is technically a pirate one but then what do you do with 1 on 1??? It's not a bad question but in the end these are just shade of grey sets, if anything you'd use them to add to existing sets. Free standing figures without a ship or land base of some sort aren't really much of a set in themselves anyway.

Well given that the reds and blues are already generic and it's only our imaginations that make them French or British it kinda doesn't make sense to make specific nationalities now. A third power seems to be missing as in the Carribean, Africa, the Pacific etc there's always atleast 3 of the European powers in any area. This way one could impersonate nationalities as we wish... Yellow troops seemed a bit obvious but the colouring wouldn't have the same impact because of the yellow skin on lego men. No one is saying it's there to replace, what's wrong with choice? I preffer the red over the blue myself.

Was expecting that poll to be a little more one sided to the Black Seas Barracuda (Dark Shark) than it was... I only have two out of the four but I just love the contrast of the red and white sails against the blue and white sails of the imperials and just that the BSB is a legend, what more can I say... Is it right that there's 4 pirate ships to only 1 each imperial faction though... *sad*

Well thanks to that thread where we talked about adding new sub-themes to the lego range and folks were arguing and specialised Dutch and Portugese forces etc it appeared to me that a third imperial force could be versatile to pit in collaboration or against the red and blue imperials. Unfortunately my bitmap images aren't the best but I did my best with MS Paint, I'd already lost a lot of work when the pc crashed, anyway here's what I came up with. I thought it might be useful to introduce purple and orange into pirate lego, this would benefit the green as the other two secondary colours and give us more options to be able to change epaullettes and feathers to indicate different nationalities as we desire. I've also designed a generic flag for the greens and what the mainsail should look like on their ship. Anyway, tell me what you think folks, pic the figures you think should be in an official green range or what figures should represent what figures or nationalities. I also have some manufactured figure shots on brickself to view... http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=280536

Ugh, I know how that feels... Reason I have no MOC's to offer *sad*

Why is it being restricted to Pirates of the Carribean and not simply just pirates of the discovery age period? Are we trying to emmulate the actual POTC franchise in this argument or just define the exact geography of pirates? I haven't voted because despite reading the threads concerned I still can't see what the debate is really about, maybe it's these long blonde locks of mine but it the thing has nothing to do with lego at all then there really isn't a basis for comparison at all, it's just two entities in history, pirates being something highly connotative as pirates have been around since the days of the pharoahs right up 'til now. Vikings in addition to living a strongly piratical way of life were an established Nordic culture for a good few centuries. Being as the two concepts aren't on the same playing field I just can't endorse the debate. If we were arguing who is better vikings or phoenicians for example that would make some sense to me. The Carribean thing really has me scratching the brains in my butt for an anthropoligial answer... Anyway for what it's worth all vikings and all pirates are smelly, rancid sods in bad need of a bath and the justice of the Royal Navy!

We've held out against much worse... :-P We'll have him shipped off to St. Helena again, just you wait 'n see. Besides he needs to be able to effectively transport all those men across the channel without our navy harrassing the dear life out of him and if he tries going for Egypt again my little British African contingent should do the trick :-P So I take it we can count on you as a commited neutral... :-D By the way, on the subject of defiantely defending England has anyone seen the preview for that new movie Elizabeth: The Golden Age ? It looks really good though it's a sequel and we should watch the initial movie Elizabeth but as I know all the history I'll wing it. The American made trailer for the film is amusing... "When the world's two most powerful countries go to war..." England was nothing at the time of the Spanish Armada, it was very much a David and Goliath situation, hence why it's so epic a piece of history. The Spanish were far more powerful at the time... bad bad advertising