icm

Glad I'm not the only one who's been wondering about that.

It wasn't just the angles. It was also because of the 1x1 notch at the wider-angle corner. But mostly it was because they didn't have notches for studs along the edge, so they couldn't be layered on top of each other or other plates. The notched edges of modern wedge plates are the real game-changer in use case compared to the old wedge plates.

I agree with that. Modern wedge plates without the corner notch are much better. Also modern wedge plates have angle ratios that are easier to work with: 1/1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/6. The old wedge plates are 3/7, which is between 1/2 and 1/3. Every now and then, though, I wish there was a modern 3/7 wedge plate with stud notches, because sometimes I just want something in between a 1/2 angle ratio and a 1/3 angle ratio ....

Yeah, I think I will too. I hope it'll be as simple as shifting the seating position back by one stud, there seems to be enough depth in the structure to accomodate an upright or nearly upright seating position. For example, the pilot in the 75301 X-wing leans pretty far back, but it's really easy to shift the seating position back by one stud and then the pilot sits close to upright. I'm also going to want to install some kind of minimal retractable landing gear on the 918, hopefully using leftover parts from the set.

I think those sets are all pretty good. They've got good minifigures, interesting terrain, good dragon-type flying animals, and even (if the press release is to be believed) good prices, except the most expensive set. I like the way they did the helicopter, and the base is just crying out to be recolored in blue to go along with 10497.

https://jaysbrickblog.com/news/lego-10497-galaxy-explorer-2022-alternate-builds/ The best B and C models in any set in years, IMO!

I love everything about it, I’ve already written at length about that in this thread. Not much more to say until I have it in hand and put together.

To be fair, the 10497 is everything I ever hoped for from a Creator 3-in-1 or Ideas Space set. But I know what you mean.

I feel like I’ve read this thread about ten times before in the last five years.

If I had all the money to buy every set I want I would get this one, but there’s so much good stuff this year that it’s very low on my list. I’m glad to hear you like it though. Knowing your discriminating tastes from our conversations on the forum, I consider any recommendation of a sci-fi spaceship type set from you a very high recommendation indeed :) Nice alt build there too! Good to see the set fulfilling its core function of being good for building and rebuilding into lots of fun wacky things.

I agree, my poor wallet can’t keep up! But there is so much great stuff, it’s like a dream.

The fact that it’s Lego is not the problem here. The fact that the cleaning person recklessly destroyed your property, then lied about it, is. As the saying goes, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up. You should absolutely do something about it.

The 10305 Lion Knights' Castle is amazing. It's also $400 plus tax. The 31120 Medieval Castle is a great castle for $100 plus tax, but it doesn't have a lot of minifigs. What if you want a really simple, classic castle? As an exercise, I built set 6073 Knight's Castle from 1984 in Studio using only parts currently available from Bricks and Pieces. The result uses 670 parts, compared to the original 408, because the panels are brick-built, and it has no horses, and the minifigs are plain, but other than that it's a pretty close copy. The render doesn't show the minifigs, shields, and weapons, but they're included in my Bricks and Pieces bag. The total cost on Lego.com is $95.15 plus tax, plus whatever two horses and saddles cost from Bricklink or Bricks and Minifigs. Genuine used copies of 6073 currently go for $175 on Bricklink in the USA, or $150-200 on eBay depending on the condition. Will I go ahead and buy the parts? Almost certainly not. The 31120 is a much better castle for $100 plus tax, except for the paucity of minifigs. But it was an interesting exercise. Maybe in a few days I'll see if Bricks and Pieces can yield up a decent light gray recolor of the Yellow Castle. The horses won't be missing from that one ....

I'm just linking here all the reviews I've read of 10497 so far: https://www.brickfanatics.com/lego-icons-10497-galaxy-explorer-review/ https://brickset.com/article/79236/review-10497-galaxy-explorer https://www.brothers-brick.com/2022/07/13/lego-icons-10497-galaxy-explorer-classic-space-has-never-looked-so-good-review/ https://ramblingbrick.com/2022/07/14/10497-galaxy-explorer-an-icon-reimagined-rambling-review/ https://www.newelementary.com/2022/07/lego-icons-review-10497-galaxy-explorer.html

I was never much into Castle, but I'd rank them as Original Lion Knights. They had the first castle built in light grey with panels and molded horses, so it was the first "real" castle IMO. Lots of classic charm there. Original Black Falcons. The contemporary opposing faction to the Lion Knights, their castles were smaller but just as good. Forestmen. A small, short-lived, subtheme, but with a strong identity that's distinct from "another square gray castle" yet fits in perfectly with the Lion Knights and Black Falcons as a Robin Hood-esque third party. Fright Knights. This was the Castle theme when I got into Lego, so its high ranking is mainly nostalgia talking. It's got a very strong identity with a completely different style of castle to the others. But the builds are very sparse and rely on huge base bricks and BURPs. Castle 2013. It's the only large quadrangle castle with both a drawbridge and a portcullis, and the dragon mountain has a nice St George-and-the-Dragon fairy-tale feel. Kingdoms. A very classic return to form for Castle, with lots of charming civilian sets, and a colorful quadrangle castle. Ranked lower than Castle 2013 just because the gatehouse of the castle is simpler. New Black Falcons/New Lions. The 31120 and 10305 castles are both very nice, wholesome Lego builds with neat minifigures (though far too few in 31120), but two one-off sets do not a Castle theme make. The 31120 is the only castle I actually own. Royal Knights. The best big castle built on a raised baseplate. Black Knights. The second best big castle built on a raised baseplate. Knights Kingdom II. A boldly experimental theme with a huge bad-guy castle for Vladek, but severely hampered by the mid-2000s use of Bionicle parts and other huge specialized action-figure parts in minifig-scale builds where they don't work well and don't belong. Fantasy Era. A boldly experimental theme pushing Castle in a new direction, but again hamstrung by all those Bionicle parts. I wasn't a big fan of the concept anyway, I don't want orcs and goblins and undead skeletons in my Lego world. Dragon Knights. Kudos to them for introducing the classic Lego dragon. Knights Kingdom I. The siege engines were ugly and the castle build was crappy, but it did experiment with a new castle shape, ie the pyramidal fairy-tale castle on a hill with banners and stained glass, rather than the quadrangular fortress on the plain. Classic Castle., ie the Yellow Castle. Very primitive, it doesn't read as a "real castle" anymore, unlike the Lion Knights and Black Falcon castles. But it started the whole thing off, so I don't feel like placing it at the bottom. Dark Forest. This subtheme didn't have a strong identity, but I did have a small set from it when I was a kid. Wolfpack. This subtheme didn't have a strong identity either.

JB Spielwaren's review of the Justifier is up:

That's one of the best Cessna 172 models I've ever seen. The runway is nice too. Do you have a Flickr account so I can conveniently "fave" the photos there? Better yet, are any instructions available? I would love to build this myself. I did about a dozen hours of flying lessons a few years ago, but I gave up partly because I was too short to reach the pedals and see over the instrument panel without great difficulty even in the tiniest of training aircraft, the Cessna 152 :(

Wonderful, I’ve been hoping someone would do this. I’d like to do it myself but there are choices to be made.

Tell you what, Merlo. You build your own fully modern Galaxy Explorer from the ground up in Studio or another digital program of your choice - or even better, in real bricks - and then make a topic about your ideal Galaxy Explorer. Until then, I think we’ll all just keep talking past each other. You’ve seen my MOC built from the ground up to be a fully modern interpretation of the classic set, according to my own ideas of how it would/should be, without being a copy of anybody else’s design - now let’s see yours. Looking forward to it :) ps, for me I my headcanon was never that the Galaxy Explorer in the set was a smaller playscale version of a much larger spaceship, like how the playscale Millennium Falcons are smaller versions of a spaceship that takes $800+ to do justice to at full minifig scale. I always felt like, well, the size of the spaceship in the set must be its true/in-universe size compared to the minifigs/people. So I designed my MOC thinking of it kind of like it being a minivan in space, with a well furnished cockpit for two up front and a couple of pretty good sized cargo spaces in the back that can haul a couple small rovers or an awful lot of luggage. There’s a little dividing wall so that the minifigs can, like, turn around in their seats and rummage in the luggage, but it’s not like a full compartment. You wouldn’t stand up in the back of a minivan and start chucking luggage around while it’s going full speed on the freeway, you wouldn’t do that while this thing is in flight either. So for me, coming from that perspective, the new set is nicely enlarged but not completely changed in scale as if it wasn’t even the same class of ship anymore. You seem to be coming from the opposite perspective, imagining the original set as this shrunken playscale version of a really huge cruiser - hence when the new set still only holds a few minifigs, albeit in a bit more style, you’re disappointed because you imagined a huge cruiser. There are a couple of huge cruiser Galaxy Explorer MOCs on the web, offhand I can think of Alec Hole and Lego Space Guy, both on Flickr. I’d be very interested to see how you would downsize an enormous vessel like that into a playscale version if you were assigned the task of developing a 90th Anniversary Galaxy Explorer for a price point of, let’s say, $400 or less to match the castle.

See, from the time I was a little kid browsing Brickset until today I’ve always thought that “what even is this” aspect of Classic Space (and later Space lines) is the worst part. I like to know what I’m looking at. I like comprehensible, clean, simple designs. For me the Galaxy Explorer is the Classic Space ship with the least aspect of “wtf is this”, which is the single biggest reason why it’s the best of the old spaceships. But I don’t think you or I are qualified to speculate on what aspects of a modern remake best embody or impugn parts of the original design intent, because neither you nor I know the mind of the original set designer. Mike Psiaki does though. The original set designer kept working at Lego for decades and only retired pretty recently, I think, so it’s more likely than not that Mike had the opportunity to pick his brain a few times. But I swear we’re talking past each other on imagination here. I’ve already posted a list of about a dozen ways the new set is wildly imaginative in my opinion, and you took that list and said you can’t see a single one. So there’s no accounting for taste. I should go back to bed.

It's the same design. Ok, back to work. Potato, potahto.

I just can't understand the logic of this post. It's like you're saying the original ship suggested all these extra details for you to imagine, and the new ship has those details, but then, no, wait, those details aren't actually present on the new ship. My head is spinning.

The shape of the 76832 reminds me of the Classic Space 6872 Lunar Patrol Craft from 1985, but there aren't all the parts in all the right colors yet to build a 76832 in the blue and gray. Having seen Veynom's recolor of it in black and yellow, I now think it's more suited to Blacktron than to Classic Space. Either way, or straight out of the box, it's a real hot ship!

@danth by @Veynom

10497: looks spaceshippy looks weird in a good way courtesy of its bulky and weird blue fuselage looks a bit retro is not a fighter plane that would fight an X-wing do fighter planes have four seats, two beds, and a rover garage? So do you want innovation in a new Galaxy Explorer, or don't you? I'm confused. Seems to me you wouldn't be satisfied with any new Galaxy Explorer. Enjoy your spiffy new Monkie Kid's Galactic Explorer! (But that's not AFOLy enough for you, so you're not interested.) Got it. Enjoy that 90th anniversary Cosmic Fleet Voyager!