andythenorth

Batman tumbler...?

Despite my guessing above, realistically it's probably servo for steer It's the easiest way to get return-to-center, which would otherwise affect the playability of the model. What's unclear is how it will operate smoothly, without snap. But I guess we'll know when we know

Does the servo have enough guts to curl the bucket?

The steered axles are cool, nice use of the torque tube

I could believe servo for switching driving rings, then - XL for travel / bucket lift - L for steer / bucket curl It would be a bit clunky to play with, not as good as a 4 motor / 4 channel set up. It's not consistent with the rumours either Hmm, XL for travel would be quite gutless imo. Look at the size of the tyres. And steering a vehicle this size needs torque too.... So alternately, servo switching driving rings with: - 2x L for travel / bucket lift - XL for steer / bucket curl This would leave the bucket functions maybe over-powered, but would give good lifting capability = good playability It would also sadly need a complicated arrangement for connecting the 2 L motors to the 2 actuators lifting the arm. Loaders need good breakout force. 8043 (A and B) shows that even M motors can make a playable model, but 8043 would be faster and smoother with bigger motors. Unrelated thought - universal joints survive ok in the rock crawler (inside the torque tube part). Should be ok in a loader. Also if it is 4 wheel drive, wonder if it will have a center-diff? Otherwise wheel wind up might be nasty (another argument in favour of 2 L motors for travel)

FWIW, here's the rear axle unit of v3 of my truck. Both axles are composed into this unit, which can be dropped out of the chassis. Connection to the chassis is as a walking beam. Minimal gear train, and everything comes apart easily if gears split (or axles shear, which has also happened). Hub reduction. Pneumatic difflocks, inspired by Sariel's design. This is v2, which failed. Lots of friction in the drive chain, and single XL up in the chassis. When I disassembled it, I found that it had sheared axles for the gears in the middle of the photo. This was due to torque loads trying to push the gear out of the drive chain, possibly made worse because of flex due to the use of the axle joiner parts.

I found that 2 XL motors ganged together will chew gears easily. This might not be a problem if the modular design makes it easy to replace gears. I have an 8x8 truck using the same tyres, roughly same scale truck. The first version had 2 XL with a a diff between them to get variable speeds (each motor on a separate channel, run one or both, the diff equalises). That chewed up the gears in the diff.... The second version had a 2 speed transmission, single XL driving rear wheels, no power to front wheels It had reasonable torque, but not much speed, and chewed up a lot of gears in the transmission Third version has one XL per rear axle, with minimal gear train. One XL drives both front axles, again minimal gear train. It's got reasonable torque, it will pull my 13Kg child on a scooter, and it will push a small table around on a smooth floor. If I ballasted it, it would pull more (loses traction). Yours looks fun.

I have got the new hubs in an 8x8 truck (twin steering axles, driven by a single XL motor, with reduction at the hubs). It's chewing up the CV joints pretty badly. At even moderate angles the CV joints bind, and can pop out. The two protruding pins are then getting chewed and ground down. They're not a bad part, they unlocked some building possibilities for this truck, but they're not a great part either

OMG, look at all the terrible new parts. When I was a child, I only had cuboid bricks. http://tweeaffect.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/yall-fogies-stand-down.html

Did you motorise it? Is the mechanism boring to turn manually? (I like manual stuff, no batteries needed, but some mechanisms are too slow to be fun).

My kids hate the Emerald Night. Wrong audience. +1 My kids hate the Emerald Night, it's not a good toy - but that's fine, and they're not the intended audience. It's for foamers.

Some mindstorms thing, measure the rotation speed on each output of the diff, with motor-driven axle brakes on each side? It's not a trivial problem to solve with mechanical means alone.

What am I missing? An LSD is a device to ensure that a wheel with traction does not have torque 'stolen' by a wheel which is spinning. I can't see how adding clutches in the drive train does that. Don't the 24t clutch designs just introduce a loss of torque to the wheel?

When I was a kid I never ever wanted a universal set. Universal sets were for school. I wanted cars and trucks and diggers and excavators and forklifts, and that's what TLG made (1980s). My brother got a universal set for the flex elements once, but what he saved up money for was the Air Tech Claw Rig. I have two kids now, take them to TrU, no universal set is going to stand out in a wall of Lego boxes. No model in a universal set is going to result in box photography that competes with a fully finished A model. The comparison with Jobs is false, Jobs led the invention of new categories of device that offered people new affordances, mostly new ways to share their baby photos and Skype Grandma. Trying to push toy sets into a channel that doesn't want them has no relation. If as AFOLs you want to *buy* universal sets, find a Lego Dacta education reseller. Dacta is easy to get hold of, in the UK at least. Dacta offers universal sets. https://education.le...d-machines-set I did buy the Krazy Kontraptions book on recommendations above, something like that would hold my kids attention for days or weeks. But the Amazon reseller failed to mention that the parts were missing from the book. Meh. Admin.

It's trailing arm, you can see it here. I don't understand why the main shaft doesn't need a spline though, the rotation point should cause the shaft to disconnect. Maybe it's an unsolved issue in the model? Impressive MOC

Diff-locks? Sariel has a design for diff-locks using a small pneumatic cylinder. Works well. http://sariel.pl/2012/05/compact-axle-with-a-differential-lock/ The link above locks a standard diff, not limited-slip. A diff that is lockable *and* limited-slip might be quite complicated

Have built this with my kids now. It's a pretty good set. It's never going to please an AFOL foamer, but... if you have kids they'll get a few hours of fun out of this one, mine are two and four and have played with it for a couple of days no batteries needed crashing is encouraged good play value: exploding rock, collapsing water tower, exploding box car, hide a minifig in the tender, rotating gatling gun, posable horse the train doesn't aim for 100% realism, but it's pretty nicely designed as a toy, the colours and details it has are attractive and it's solidly built It's a shame the film bombed - this is the kind of £79 unpowered train set that (as a parent) TLG should be offering imo. High play value, lots of nice parts if they want to rebuild it. If you have two kids who will both play with this, £79 for this is a fair price. Non-franchised, losing a couple of minifigs, it could be cheaper (£65?). For AFOLs, if you saw this remaindered on discount, (I don't care about this stuff, but I hopefully I've figured out what motivates AFOLs) you get: 6 large train wheels, 4 with flanges, 2 without 8 wheelsets, (~£10 on bricklink) cowcatcher brass-effect bell oval of track including 4 straights 7 buffers and couplings (~£5 on bricklink) a range of nice parts in dark green, same green as Emerald Night some useful black roof slopes a box car and flat car which are well designed and easily adapted to suit your taste perfectly functional simple water tower posable white horse a stack of good greeble parts: tan bush, dynamite, silver gems, a bunch of cheese and other slopes in ground colours. a bunch of minifigs and weapons and stuff that you could bricklink, or trade or give away This is an under-rated set, and if I see one at TrU on discount, I'd buy another for parts. Unless you get there first

+1 to a narrower track for powered steering axles with suspension.

My kids would know if I was joking. How come you can't tell?

Yeah absolutely. This is a well known fact. It's caused by the government spraying chemicals into the sky, in preparation for rounding everyone up and making them work in forced labour camps.

TLG should stop doing this. It's a quality toy, badly presented. It devalues all the thought and the customer care that Lego are good at it. It's sloppy for a brand that waves educational credentials around a lot. It's also misleading, at least in the UK where product descriptions need to be accurate under consumer protection law. I doubt anyone is ever going to sue over it, but it's bad for reputation and could cause unnecessary customer service incidents. On the other hand they've been doing this at least since I could read, so 1984 or so. Catalogues have often featured translation mistakes and misleading descriptions. /soapbox

Log wagon? Probably not, but would fit nicely with other logging stuff in City

What I am really hoping for in 2014 is another tedious driving ring gearbox, with one toggle on each side of the model to switch between functions. These are always really fun to build, what with all the interesting new ways to use a driving ring and some 16t gears. And they always expand my mind by showing me intricate new mechanisms, like, how to use driving rings and clutches. Again. Still, there's always something new, like sometimes axle joiners are used as the control levers, and other models use ball joints. So there is innovation. I also really like the way they fill up the mid-section of the model, and the way the chassis is designed around them. It prevents me doing anything silly like modifying the functions of the set, or adding more functions. This is stuff I did to a lot of sets as a child, and it's nice to know that it's now really hard as it prevents kids and AFOLs messing up the sets. The one place I'd wind my neck in on this is 8043. For non-english, English speakers, I am serious in the following comment, and not in the ones before: for my money, 8043 is the best designed, most playable RC Technic set yet, and the driving ring gearboxes and the drive through the slew ring make complete sense. Yes, it could have used motors in the chassis, but I think that's actually less interesting than showing the use of the gearbox as an alternative to more motors. Kids love it, AFOLs love it. It's just fun, and makes a nice clunk when you change functions.

I'm definitely going to pass on this. Although I have no idea what it is, and I haven't seen the design, I definitely don't like it. Whatever TLG have done, it's not to my taste, and there's definitely too much yellow. EDIT, deleted some stuff that would get me a mod warning, again. Let's just say that yellow flagships are not new, nor particularly more common now than any time since 1977. Check out Brickset http://www.brickset.com/browse/themes/?theme=Technic has got boring' does not stack up, unless you fancy a trip back to the glory days of 'Slizers'. No? Suggestion: each year start two threads, '20xx rumours' and '20xx bitching'. I've got zero interest in trying to stop people slagging TLG's set roster, but it's tedious trying to sort the actual rumours from the 'me too' comments and complaints. It's an off-topic problem imho, do it in another thread. Probably every sub-theme forum would benefit from this. Also, why is 2014 Technic missing Police and Fire sets?

Servo is under-powered for articulated steering at the size being talked about. Would also impose nasty shock loads - jerky steering at best. +1 to servo switching between bucket lift and bucket roll. I also think a single XL would be underpowered for drive if this is as big as being predicted, unless the model is quite light. Could be geared down I guess - reduction hubs?