Hrw-Amen

This is one of my favourite ADU sets, the little alien ships are I think the thing that make it really for me. I do like the helicopter but from the look on the box it seemed a bit bulky. When I made mine I was pleased to find it was not as bad as the picture made out, although the flick cire missiles I found are a bit difficult to handle without knocking bits off of it, but then I am rather big and awkward! Good review though and good to see that pilot handing the alien over to the marines once he has landed.

I think the space station is my favourite, it looks like something from a movie but I cannot put my finger on it. If the grey was a trans neon green it could be a Blacktron outpost?

Yes, at least it has a central hub with control area, a docking ring that attaches to the bottom of the original mothership (Made from those same round bricks.) and then a corridor from eeither side of the central hub that each lead to two identical drop ships that have saucer fronts and a cabin at the rear for alien troops to deploy from. As the bits are modular I reckon I could add more corriodr sections to enable other things like a small hanger bay for the little craft, at least that is my long term plan.

Really good to see a proper mothership. I have been working on a bigger one myself and will post when it is done. I always felt that the official set was not mothershipy enough as it could not connect to the others which seemed to me to be a thing that was a requirement for being called a mothership. Anyway, yours is really nice. Have you included lots of sound and light bricks?

I dug out some very old LEGO space stuff when spring cleaning in the attic at the weekend. I was surprised as I thought they were in the attic at my mother's! A very old cardboard box that looked like nothing but when I openned it I found them. All of these were made at my previous house so have to be at least twenty years old, a lot of the bricks are much older hence some miscoloured ones, some maye forty years especially the white and blue. I think my favourite is the Blacktron transport with the tailgunner. I remember making it all those years ago! I think I had just been watching some old war movies with Lancasters at the time! There is also a Blacktron dropship, which is more bulky than I would like. But back then there was no internet, no Bricklink so I had what I had and that was that. I am know I could do much better now, but these ships being so old I do not have the heart to dismantle them. Maybe I should make newer versions though at some point? Anyway it is awful how dusty they get, they were in a sealed box wrapped in plastic bags and they still got covered in dust which was very hard to get off, much of it becoming almost ingrained. I spent a few hours dusting them at the weekend. There is also an Ice Planet drop ship that I was pleased to see being flown by the Ice Planet Babe! As well as this there was my other Octan ship that wen along with the one I posted a few weeks ago. This one had the old 9V lights, but I have not got a battery for it at the moment to see if they still work. I will have to get one. There were also a lot of classic space sets but they have yet to be dusted. I was surpised to see that many of the original red and white astronaut minifigs had stickers for the decorations on their torso. I did not realise that, not all of them but a good few! Anyway, I'll post them when they are dusted off. I have included a couple of links for my Brickshelf and Flickr.BrickshelfFlickr I realise before anyone points it out that my photography is not very good, I understand that but wanted to show my models anyway. I have never been much good at it inspite of many years trying. edit:- Not sure where the pictures went first time round, they were there, then not, now they are again?

Having alternative ideas in the box was good although not all of them were that brilliant they did get you interested in thinking for yourself about what you could make. Very often when I am at my local store I hear parents complaining that LEGO nowadays can only be used to make the thing on the front of the box. I think this is partly down to this lack of ideas leaflet. The one thing I do miss though for MOCing is being able to buy a box of bits all in the same colour. I remember (Must have been around 1990?) being able to go into my local store and purchase a box that contained just blue, or black or whatever colour bricks I was after. OK, I know we have PAB and online nowadays, but hardly anyone except the few and far between LEGO stores have a PAB and whilst ordering online either from Shop at Home or Bricklink is good and in many ways much better, it is not the same as going down the local toy shop and picking up an actual box there and then. Also you don't seem to be able to buy boxes of 33 degree roof tiles nowadays, just the 45 degree ones and only in red, I am sure I used to be able to get them in blue when I was a kid?

These are really nice, I like them all but the base is y favorite I like the little crawler vehicle.

Yes the red one definately looks older, it looks a bit like a mini-sub as well. I can see the youngsters tearing around the galaxy delivering stuff in the second one though, maybe just flinging stuff out the cargo bay into orbit, a bit like a kid flinging newspapaers onto someones lawn rather than putting them in the letterbox.

How do you know ir is a Canadian?

Is that some kind of battle going on in the middle of the street? The police need to get on top of that as they seem to be holding up the traffic, perhaps Chuck N will sort them out? It does seem very busy, but then city centres often do and all those crazy things going on, well it is a LEGO City after all! On a personal note I would not worry too much about the camera work, nice photos are good if you can get them, but as a rule it is something I have difficulty with as well. It is just nice to see what other people are doing though so thank you for posting these.

It may be an obvious answer, but could you not just run it a bit slower?

Perhaps it uses steam to blow wind to drive the fans, otherwise if it was a nice sunny day it would not be going anywhere? Nice to see an original idea though and I particularly like the engine worky bits shot.

Well all I can say is that wife always wants to make up any City vehicles that I buy, (Which can get annoying if I am looking forwards to them.) and she especially likes the fire and police sets.

This really does have the feel of 1940s about it. The figures are really good at evoking that era and the colour of the trams all those pastel blues, they look so much like the real thing.

I don't normally go for digital LEGO stuff prefering brick built every time but I have to say that this is really impressive. I am sure when you get to build it it will look even better. Please remember to post pictures when you get all the bits together for the build.

Some times things don't have to be big on the alien theme. I have an alien in my LEGO City police force just in with the human ones, (Not all aliens are bad aliens.) and as he is running down the street with a couple of other cops nobody seems to have noticed or pointed him out. Perhaps it is the same here, the alien is hiding in plain sight where no-one will notice or think to look.

Well I am near an Olympic venue but we have no LEGO store for miles and miles, but any Olympic Mini-figs would be fantastic and much more exciting than the event itself which seems to be creating nothing but trouble for locals. Some Mini-figs would be a good consolation prize!!

I can agree with a lot of this. I have some modular MOCuildings that I have made. Although they tend to cost less per month than a single modular as a project will take three or four months to et all the bricks for from bricklink. Thereby the building experienc lasts longer.Mine are up on the shelf gathering dust it is true. Sometimes I take them down, move the figures about a bit.(Dust them.) But I like to have a row of colourful buildings to look atIdo not intend to take them apart as they have taken so long to build, but that is not to say I will never modifythem if I have a good idea bit like a real property changs over time. So there is some fun still to be had from it. Trouble is they do take up fair bit of room when you have a few of them.

It is finally good to see the community getting behind a product, (As well as support from other sources.) to try and make it a reality. Lets hope it makes it through and we can actually buy it.

That is actually very nice and a good idea for those of us with not a lot of room. Good to see you have been building some trackside stuff as well to make it look even better. I guess all those small creator vehicles will be good for this size layout.

I have to agree that I find LDD a bit difficult to get into. I think it is much better to just start building. I would say that I have recently (Over the last couple of years.) built up quite a collection of bricks. I have a massive amount in my parents attic but it is hard for me to get at them, so pretty much started from scratch at my current home. To begin with I bought a few smaller creator sets and that was great to get back into it, but I soon realised that if I wanted to make larger things like modular buildings which I did, then that would not be anything like enough. I have found that Bricklink is the best place followed by Shop at Home and then PAB walls, although these are quite rare so it depends where you are. At the end of the day if you want to make modulars you are going to need enough basic bricks to make walls and plates for floors. I made a few larger orders on Bricklink and Shop at Home just concentrating on getting supplies of basic bricks to make those things before getting little detailed parts that you can then pick up in smaller orders once you have an idea of what youn are going to build.

It seems to be an enduring problem of model trains that they simply need loads of space to go up and down ramps, a bit like the real thing. (That image from Switzerland looks like it would be a terrfiying ride for a passenger!) Even on my N Gauge layout that I had as a kid it took a whole length of the attic wall for a train to get up about four inches, that was probably an incline some five meters long, even then on long trains we used to get some slipping. I think that rack and pinion method is best if you want to model it to be seen although the transitions would be tricky with I suspect having to have just special trains to avoid things lifting off the track etc. Other than that I like the idea of a hidden lift, but it sounds like a huge technical challenge probably requiring loads more bricks than most of us have available. Still it would be good to see someone build one. It almost seems cheaper though to buy two trains, have a big tunnel covering multi levels park in one then start the second one on the upper track and just pretend?

Yes, I like the roof also, but I also like your design for the toilet. Did you get any pictures of those micro scale trains? Every attic needs a train set!

I don't see it as that odd that Octan would make it into the future. I am sure that in the future we will see many commercial ventures into space and some of those will probably come from large coporations that exist today. (Like Virgin for example.) Anyway, when I was a kid I had lots of Octan space stuff so it is quite normal for me to see this.

I don't think representing ethnic groups would be a real problem with keeping yellow heads/hands for most mini-figs. I mean they are doing OK in the custome minifig range, they don't look out of place. So if there is a reason to have a brown, white or whatever colour face/hands then that is fine, I have no problem, but I do think generic yellow which is so classic to the LEGO Mini-fig should be used for everything else. However as I said before I am not that bothered by it and if some people prefer fleshies, then that is OK.