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Welcome back! There will always be a home for you here! I'm horrified to hear about the fire, and happy that you are dipping a toe back into the Technic world. Personally I would be very sad if Technicopedia were to go. Besides the nostalgia, it still offers some things that video reviews do not: it is clearly organised, it covers all the historic sets, and actually I think it offers a valuable distinct approach and perspective on technic. When it comes to online information, redundancy is a good thing. Who knows what the future will look like? Youtube may lose its relevance or even disappear - some governments seem to be currently gearing up to kill it, for example. Some energetic person might at some point take the content in Technicopedia and modernise and update it (with your blessing hopefully). But once the information is gone it is hard to get back. Similar reasoning inspired the community to save brickshelf. That said, I understand that maintaining it carries some cost and mental effort, even if it is fairly low. While you will get enthusiastic responses here, it seems unlikely that many people are using the site beyond a limited band of enthusiasts. Does that matter? I don't know. Obviously only you can decide.

By the way, we should appreciate the small victory that the gears are indexed the right way round. A significant fraction of the general public will think "higher gear should mean faster engine speed", and I'm sure there will have been some internal pressure to make it this way. I'm glad the temptation to treat customers like idiots was resisted. Choices like this probably owe a lot to the many excellent reviewers who are now part of the ecosystem. Had they gone the "idiot route" it would have been immediately called out by RacingBrick and others, and TLG know this!

Yes, exactly like that

How about playable games more generally?

To be fair this one also looks as if it has suffered from being handled by many grubby hands. That combined with the intense lighting makes the smudges and dirt stand out.

To expand on my comment about the pin with stop bush: consider the two parts that it joins together - an axle coming right upto, but not into, a pin hole. If the axle were a perfect cylinder literally just touching a cylindrical hole of the same diameter then it would be impossible to join them together - there would be no space for any material in the gap. The existence of this part rests entirely on the various tiny tolerances (small gaps, rounded axle end, recessed pin holes, cross shaped axle)! Even though Lego does some things we don't like, we shouldn't lose sight of the exquisite brilliance of designs like this.

This sounds right. Also the axle itself has a rounded end, so the hole only needs to be full depth right near the centre. Still, it's somewhat miraculous that it works. I find the pin with bush similarly surprising.

That's not true at all. In fact before 2020 every motorcycle was without a gearbox.

This is very nice and a very original style!

That is indeed how it works, although it is nothing to do with divisibility of 360. Dividing a circle into 360 degrees is simply a convention for describing angles - it has no bearing on physical reality. You could measure angles in any units and divide a circle into any number of equal parts. Although the design is quite simple, I actually find the simplicity quite pleasing in its own right. And the way the reverse selector bypasses the gearbox is neat. I agree that the drums are rather specialised, but I can still see them being useful elsewhere. Three-way selection is a useful concept in general. Just being able to offset an axle by 40 degrees (via the red one) could be useful, without even using the selector groove.

Cool - we can now indeed clearly see that the axle are at different angles on the two sides of a selector cylinder, together with the ABC and 123 labels used to align them correctly.

The offset axle holes within the drum seem to be visible in the top picture here:

Unfortunately we can't see your picture in the UK. (But I'm assuming it's the underside view from earlier). That's very neat if the reverse gear skips the gearbox like this! The differential connects via a 20t via the red 16t idler near the middle of the picture to a 16t hidden below the upper shaft in my picture. So yes, indeed, the red side's bottom axle.

I think the red and yellow drums must have two non-aligned axle holes on the two sides, to achieve the necessary rotational offsets. (Apologies if this has been mentioned already). It feels like a bit of a sneaky trick, but it is the obvious solution to the problem.

Yes, indeed, it presumably could have been much more compact, but besides authenticity (which I haven't looked into) it's nice and understandable this way. The reverse mechanism is off to the left of this picture - I don't know exactly how that works.