Bartybum

From those pics am I seeing correctly that there's double wishbone suspension in the front, and a live or pendular axle at the rear with yellow shocks?

I know right, what the actual hell? 2500 pieces with only basic motorization shouldn't be any more than 200-250€. I wonder if they originally wanted to do RC...

I like those wheel covers, quite interesting and organic

SWEET HEAVENS YES!!! Now if only it was a motorized pneumatic model Actually wait no what the actual hell, this sucks. There's no drive to the tracks??? Wtf is the point of a model like this if they're gonna price it like an RC model and then skimp out on functions? It's not even difficult to implement drive.

Dude I know right, finally something that actually looks like what it's meant to be respresenting

Damn that looks pretty slick, very interested to see what the rest will look like

Very interesting, thank you!

What I mean is I don't think people will get confused and buy something thinking they're getting something else. If they do they have only themselves to blame for not reading packaging

Anyone know what's under K2-SO's elbow? I don't think I've ever seen that part before...

I'm not sure this will really be a problem

You shouldn't care. What they wrote was perfectly comprehensible if you even remotely understand English

Actually yeah you're right, it'd require a silly amount lmao

Bit of a shame it isn't in the iconic orange and green Renown livery

Y'know, sir actually would be REALLY interested in a motorized pneumatic excavator with motorized drive and slew. Gimme gearboxes and pneumatics pls, not boring direct drive functions

No, but being $400 for 2.4k pieces is

Given they're electric motors, one would expect them to have permanent magnets inside lol

Yeah agreed, more kinetic sculptures would be really cool

Found a YouTube playlist for you:

It does seem that both have converged towards the same thing - aesthetically interesting sets with just a couple mechanical functions. Save for very few large sets, Technic just seems to be an excuse to use a different building system. What's the point? Cram in more functions, start doing smaller pneumatic sets again, do more linkages, more suspension systems, ditch the encoder electronics and use stepper mechanisms (since that's all you ended up using the encoders for anyway...). It could be so much better if the small sets weren't just shoveling tarted up dross out the door.

I think this joint would actually work best either as a hip/thigh or shoulder joint, followed by a bicep/thigh swivel. That being said, we already have the following parts to replicate the same joint behaviour, albeit a bit less stiff:

Jesus this is such a stupidly clever mechanism... I'm genuinely amazed by it. Hope this means that Lego mech articulation will start improving!

If you got the main rotor to spin fast enough you could implement a properly articulated rotor system that allows the blades to flap and lag like they do in real life. You'd probably need to go pretty fast for there to be any visible motion from aerodynamics so I think that's quite unlikely. More realistically, I think the selling point for Technic helicopters will lie either in alternative rotor configurations such as intermeshing (Kaman K-Max) or coaxial (Kamov Ka-32 unlicensed ripoff but this time with full cyclic, collective and differential collective pitch), or interesting airframes like the Sikorsky Skycrane. A Chinook would probably end up in the same fiasco that killed the Osprey. I can't say I'd really be interested in any helicopters beyond those four though.

Called it, RC excavator was the only thing that made sense for $400 and 2.4k pieces My guess is the overall envelope will be slightly larger than 8043, maybe 20-25%

Usually hitting backspace a couple times works for me

I think an 18+ set with 2.5k pieces would suit an RC excavator just fine. Remember that 8043 only had ~1.2k pieces - increase the scale by 20-25% and you've got yourself roughly double the volume/piece count. I wouldn't rule it out so quickly