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@Roger Wacker - Thanks for your reply! I'm in the United States, so I haven't thought much about applying to ESA, but it might be worth looking into. You say it's simple, but that Artemis 3 RPO EKF work sounds pretty complex to me. It's nice that you get to keep doing that work as a freelance consultant after retiring, but I'm sure they're happy to let you do it because it means your talent stays in the workforce a little bit longer, just as things are really getting going with Artemis. I'm going to send you a DM on Eurobricks, and then we can get into personal emails from there. Happy to make your acquaintaince a little better!

Like I said, until now I've been mostly amiably happy for the people who got the limited Bugatti set. On Brickset, I commented that I was happy it was so limited because then I could enjoy it without feeling the fomo-need to add it to my wanted list. I haven't commented about it on any other platforms than Eurobricks and Brickset, and I certainly haven't contacted that Instagram user, nor anybody else, to ask for instructions. I understand the etiquette of instruction sharing: you don't ask for instructions for very large or very complex MOCs or builds that use very rare pieces, and you don't ask people to freely share instructions that the creator sells for money. When someone says they're not going to make and/or share instructions for their MOC, you take no for an answer and you don't keep pestering them about it. But this isn't a MOC, it's a limited set made by the Lego company itself. That means the instructions should be shared. Everybody knows the instructions for official Lego sets are freely sharable. Now, there are promotional Lego sets where the instructions aren't uploaded online, including the Inside Tour sets, the Employee Gift sets, etc. Nobody gets this worked up about sharing their instructions because those are usually also given to LAN members, who post sufficiently detailed reviews that anyone who wants to go to the effort could, in principle, recreate the set with minor substitutions. There's still an ethos of sharing, even with those very exclusive sets. But this Instagram user's reply, as posted in this thread a little while ago, goes against that ethos of sharing. If he had said he wasn't going to share the instructions because it's too much hassle, then fine, we understand. It can take real effort to get good scans of a printed document, and then you have to decide where to host them. Or, if he had posted a detailed building review instead, that would also be fine. You don't need every step of the instructions to recreate something as long as you have pictures of key assemblies along the way. Or even if he had just politely declined to share them, that would be fine too. We understand! You have no obligation to share the instructions just because you were lucky enough to get this extremely limited set! Instead of taking any of those options, though, he hid behind the facile and false excuse that they're "not his property to distribute." Lie number one. You can share Lego instructions. Next, this: "Lego made something very special and I am honored to have one." It is this notion of being honored for something special that is elitist and aggravating. Coupled with the refusal to share the instructions, that comes across as him saying he's better than everybody else - more special, more deserving. No, pal. You're lucky you got this because you've got a cool car and Lego decided to give people in your cool car club a cool toy. That's what makes it a polite way of saying "f--- you regular Lego fans, I got mine." And that's the problem. The problem is not that he's not sharing the instructions. The problem is that he projects an arrogant and disdainful, elitist attitude while doing so, and hides behind a facile lie to justify it.

Yes, very disappointing and aggravatingly elitist. I've been mostly amiably happy for the people who got the limited Bugatti set, but my opinion has now changed. If they've got that "f--- you" attitude towards regular Lego fans and they try to back it up with the ridiculous claim that it's illegal for them to share the instructions (it's not), then they can just f--- right off and take their Bugatti right with them. I don't like to gatekeep, but Imma gatekeep a little here: we don't need people like that in the Lego community.

Very interesting project, thanks for posting. The video explains what's going on clearly enough for even me to follow, without a lot of mucking about with gear ratios. Looking forward to seeing more builds like this as long as you're interesting in making them.

@Murdoch17, sounds like it's time for a discussion about whether this is a two party first past the post voting system as is mostly the case in the United States, or if this is a multiparty proportional representation system as is mostly the case in Europe. Since this is Eurobricks, I think a multiparty coalition system is more plausible, and as such the coalition for allowing greater discussion of competing brick brands won soundly. If we're treating this as a poll rather than an election, and considering sampling error for a relatively small selection of the much greater count of registered users, then it seems plausible to suppose that options one and two are, statistically speaking, tied.

Off-topic, but I think some of the language in these new guidelines may be the closest TLG ever comes to openly acknowledging the B&M debacle (boldface added for emphasis):

I always go to the All Activity page, so it doesn't make a difference to me how the forum is organized. I just see all the posts in all the threads and decide whether to read them or not. I also almost never go to the Eurobricks front page, even though I go to the All Activity page many times a day.

Cool, thanks for your reply. I found some of your abstracts on the NASA technical reports server, but I don't have time to find and read the full reports right now. I guess you were first looking for work in the mid-eighties? What was your masters work in, and what was your PhD work in before you decided to leave the program? Back before covid, I did my masters work with a simple problem in autonomous EKF angles-only navigation during a hyperbolic flyby, but my PhD work has been partly a simple problem in solar system dynamics and partly a simple application of statistics to asteroid orbits. I don't really see much of a future for myself in solar system dynamics, so I'm looking for work in space GN&C, but it's been so long since my masters that I'm worried I won't be able to get work in that field either. Edited to remove asking about where you worked, that was maybe a bit much.

Oh, so THAT's where all the "space battle budget" went that they've been skimping on since 2019. The lack of star wars in Star Wars streaming shows since 2019 has been disappointing me every season of every show, but it looks like we're finally getting some big bangs in Ahsoka season 2. I hope season 2 has better writing and better pacing than season 1, though. The Lego sets for Ahsoka season 1 were great, the show itself was not.

Hi, thanks for posting. Can you please edit your post to use a smaller font? I understand that you may need the larger font at the end of your 40-year career, but it makes your post a little harder to read for me. Sounds like you've had a very bad experience with this set. Speaking for myself, I did not have any missing pieces in my copy of set 10341. You should probably inventory all the pieces before you continue, so that you can request all the missing pieces from Lego at once. You should probably have already done that. It's a bother, I know, but it's less of a bother to order the missing pieces once and receive them once than to stop-and-start the build many times as you continue from bag to bag discovering missing pieces. Edit - You say you personally worked on a number of GN&C systems for Artemis. Can you tell us a little more about your work for the Artemis program? I'm graduating with my PhD pretty soon (knock on wood) and looking for jobs in space GN&C (knock on wood again), and during my master's program several years ago we regularly had guest speakers talk about their work planning trajectories or working on navigation problems for Orion, before the Artemis 1 mission plan had been finalized. I'd be fascinated to hear any stories you can tell about your work on Artemis and/or SLS.

Not just you. They're very loose in my copy of the set too.

Nicely done. I just built a secondhand copy of set 76447 this morning. It's a very nice medium-large Castle tower that seems to invite different factional rebuilds like this, or it could stand as a Castle tower on its own if you just swap the Harry Potter minifigs to something else. I don't know what Castle faction would work best with it, though. Ravens? Snakes? ... It's a pity we don't get medium-sized tower playsets like this in a Castle theme anymore. If you ignore the Harry Potter license, I think 76447 is one of the best Castle towers that Lego has ever made.

Thanks for this write-up! Nice to see a review like this from the perspective of a knowledgeable but not obsessive fan, with a positive but not sycophantic outlook. It reminds me of the old days of long-form written photo reviews on Eurobricks and FBTB forums, before video reviews by full-time LAN YouTubers and photo reviews by full-time staff on LAN blogs became ubiquitous. The Pokemon Smart Brick sets are certainly a lot better than the Star Wars Smart Brick sets.

I think MOCs that are mostly Lego parts should be in the existing forums with tags, and MOCs that are mostly alt bricks should be in the alt-brick forum, especially if they are built in alt-brick themes. For example, a modular building MOC in the Lumibricks cyberpunk theme ought to go in the alt-brick forum.

I agree with @danth. Let's not get too ambitious just now. As the saying goes, Keep It Simple, Stupid: Small, iterative changes are best. If the forum develops in the direction of needing more separate subforums or more separate tagging requirements, that can be dealt with later. For now, let's have just one forum for alt brands, and tagging requirements for alt bricks.