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Oh, and the two spaceships from the Overwatch line last year, let's not forget those! They may be nominally based on a video game, but the set designer took such great creative license that they're virtually original creations. You even get an astronaut gorilla with those! (The astronaut gorilla being the part of the set that takes the least creative license with the source material, somehow.)

Hear, hear! I was going to make virtually that identical post myself. Last year was an absolute bonanza for space sets.... As long as you don't hold yourself to an antiquated rigid standard that only "traditional" Space counts. I think I've repeated that in like a dozen separate posts by now. Speaking of which, you left off at least two TLM2 spaceships; the Rescue Rocket and the Rexplorer. Plus the Apollo 11 Lunar Lander. (Not to mention the great selection of --- ssshhh, quiet --- spaceships from a galaxy far far away!). And the flying machines from Ninjago and, before that, Nexo Knights and the Lego Batman movie that are, let's face it, functionally indistinguishable from spaceships. And all the flying machines from Super Heroes that are also either spaceships with a capital S or nearly indistinguishable from spaceships. I could go on, but I won't.

According to the usual definitions at Brickset, Bricklink, and other fan sites, "Classic Space" is the 1978-1986 era in which the astronaut minifigures had old-style helmets without visors and plain solid-color helmet/airtanks/hips and legs/torso combinations with the only decoration being the Space logo on the front. According to this strict definition, "Classic Space" was replaced in 1987 by Futuron and Blacktron, which were the first named Space subthemes, the first distinct factions, and the first to have visors and more detailed torso decorations. Speaking less strictly, nothing "replaced" Classic Space. The Lego Space line evolved continuously through the year 1998. When Star Wars was introduced in 1999, Space took a two-year break and came back in 2001 with Life on Mars. It was then absent until 2007-2013, and has been absent as a continuous line since then, though there have been original Space-themed sets in other lines, including Creator, the Lego Movie, the Lego Movie 2 (which was all about spaceships!), the Lego Batman Movie, and even Star Wars itself via original content like the Freemaker Adventures. @danth believes that there is a non-compete agreement between Lego and Lucasfilm preventing Lego from developing and marketing new original Space themes while Star Wars movies are in theaters. I'm not privy to any inside information, but on the surface that argument seems plausible, especially when you consider the proliferation of action-adventure themes since 1999. Action-adventure themes share much of the design language of Space, with an emphasis on fantastic and whimsical vehicles that have moving parts, transformation features, and deployable small craft, but they are set on some comic-book version of Earth rather than somewhere out in the galaxy. Action-adventure themes began in 1995 with Aquazone, which is well known to have begun development as a Space subtheme called Seatron, and to have used Space designers and Space design elements. The next action-adventure theme was Time Cruisers, which again had a number of Space and sci-fi elements. After the introduction of Star Wars in 1999, non-Space action-adventure themes became the rule. For instance, Rock Raiders is, like Aquazone, a Space theme in disguise: the titular miners are on another planet, with a large spaceship in orbit. Alpha Team, introduced in 2001, carried on the tradition of colored glass in its flying machines. It had a rocket and an airspeeder. Its next wave, in 2002, had a base and a capital ship and a range of smaller ships ... but they were underwater, not in space. And so on, with the Arctic wave of Alpha Team, then Agents and Ultra Agents. See also Ninjago, Nexo Knights, Legends of Chima, Power Miners, and Atlantis.

@astral brick, all your questions have already been discussed and answered in exhaustive detail many times over in the thread linked below. I recommend you read the entire thing.

You can say that again .... a $100 Creator 3-in-1 set with the A model as an homage to 928 (Galaxy Explorer), the B model an homage to 926 (Command Center), and the C model an homage to 483 (Alpha-1 Rocket Base) would closely parallel the $100 Creator 3-in-1 set with the A model as a traditional two-masted, two-gun-broadside pirate ship, the B model a medium-sized tavern, and the C model a small island. That would be pretty great.

See, the problem is defining something as classic and deriving expectations from that. "Classic" is not an essential aspect of the nature of anything, it is a label applied retroactively after something has been appreciated for years. Just like happiness is a by product of living well and cannot be successfully pursued as an independent goal, and commercial success is ideally a by product of making good products rather than seeking to maximize share prices, classic status is always an earned by product of ongoing success rather than a status that is declared by fiat.

Follow the money. See where the market takes you. That's how.

Thank you for this wonderfully detailed review of a splendid set. It reminds me of the detailed photo reviews with lots of responses that used to distinguish Eurobricks when the forum was new, in the late 2000s. I was just barely getting into Lego as a kid when this set came out, so I was aware of it and I wanted it but it was long gone by the time my parents were buying me anything larger than impulse-size sets. I really miss the alt builds on the back of the box and the wonderful practical product photography that used to distinguish the box art and the catalogs. You could find similar brick-built scenes for City waves in City instructions as recently as two or three years ago, but in general they're long gone for most lines, and they seem to be gone for City now too. The 1997 Divers line had such a fun subtropical atmosphere, with all these happy people just loving their jobs and learning all this cool stuff. I always imagined the setting to be in bright shallow waters off the Bahamas, or the Florida Keys, or maybe the Great Barrier Reef or the Galapagos. The City divers lines seem to take place in darker, deeper waters with less light and less marine life, and higher pressure requiring more cautious, less fun work. A couple of years ago, I bought a copy of Deep Sea Refuge (I knew it as Deep Reef Refuge) off eBay; I just recently pulled it out of storage again during lockdown. Such a fun set! Such a nice combination of vehicles and bases and scenery, with realistic and accurate and playable, yet simple builds, and a large number of minifigs and sea creatures. The boat works very well for playing Jaws with the shark. If you get rid of the sea creatures and flippers and look at the base and the scenery and the minifigures with slightly different eyes, you have a pretty good base on an alien planet too. Please keep these reviews coming!

I don't have the kit, but I just went and read the instructions. It looks difficult but probably not impossible. Try starting from the other end; that is to say, starting from a different part of the assembly. It looks to me like the best way to start would be removing the two 3L axles with stud that go in the sides near the bottom of the frame. You'll have to dismantle the body before you can get to that point, but you've probably taken the rest of the set apart by now anyway. That should give you wiggle room to remove the two 3L light gray connectors that they go into, and from there you should be able to get the rest of the frame apart.

Where I live in the USA there is no separate test for a manual. All the drivers ed cars at the schools are automatics, and the test is in an automatic, but you aren't legally restricted to driving automatics. I drive a 5+R manual pickup truck. In my opinion, you should learn how to drive a manual transmission as soon as you can.

The exploration subthemes are 2HY releases, not 1HY releases. We won't know what next summer's exploration subtheme is until sometime next spring.

Just to be clear, right now a Durmstrang ship is 100% wish list?

In the lead-up to the Sian's release, I told myself that if the new Technic supercar had a better gearbox than the last two and had properly adjusted suspension, I'd go ahead and get it as a holiday gift to myself. Well, the Sian's gearbox is better (you can actually see it!), and the suspension is better, and the doors are better (it has fun remotely operated scissor doors instead of boring normal doors without mechanisms). But there are a number of little things that still bug me, and then there's the huge problems with color consistency. I think that instead of buying the Sian this December, I'll wait until summer 2022. If there's another supercar at that time and it's better, I'll buy that one instead. If there isn't another one in the series by that time and this one is going EOL, I'll pick it up then. It's a set that's going to be sold for at least two years, so I can afford to wait.

That's as plausible a reason as any for why Dune isn't allowed. It's one thing to have spice runners as background elements of the Star Wars universe, and another thing to have the entire universe revolve around a highly addictive psychoactive drug.

Dune isn't allowed.

They say it for the benefit of new customers who haven't heard of any of the previous versions and who may therefore think it is a hilarious hidden surprise instead of a bog-standard simple play feature. They say it because it's a very expensive set so it has to have excessively long ad copy and they need something to say.

Hi, everybody - I build a lot of models in Studio but I rarely post them to Eurobricks because most of them are simple copies of other people's builds that I like. I'll usually copy the outside, making whatever changes I like as I go, then build up the interior structure. This pirate ship, in contrast, is entirely my own design - well, except for the hull, which is modified from 21317 Steamboat Willie. But I haven't seen anybody else build a pirate ship based on that hull, so I'll count it. Comments and criticisms are very welcome; I know very little about masts and rigging for sailing ships, or really anything else about them. When the Ideas team tackled the Pirate Bay, they found that the fan model was unworkable as a set because it had such a huge footprint (48x64), relied on a huge raised baseplate that's been out of production since about 2009, used obsolete masts that have been out of production since about 2001, and relied on old narrow hulls that have also been out of production since 2001. Rather than strictly keep the original concept of a large, tall island with a large building and a small shipwreck, they decided that the easiest thing to do to preserve most of the features of the building and also keep the spirit of the thing (which was just to be "the ultimate Pirates set") was to make the entire building be parts of one big shipwreck, sitting on a relatively small, low island. During the weeks of speculation leading up to the release of the Pirate Bay, some forum users speculated that it would come with parts to restore the shipwreck into a complete ship and sail it away - what a great idea! - but they didn't expect the whole thing to be restored into a sailable ship, leaving nothing behind. My goal is to redesign the Pirate Bay to keep almost all of the features of the original submission on a 32x64 (two baseplate) footprint without using all those obsolete parts. I'll be taking a lot of liberties with the design as I go, but it'll be fun to see the result. The first part of the project was to design the small ship that will then get turned into a wreck. It uses about 900 parts. It features room for two cannons, a detailed cabin, a moving rudder, a windlass for the anchor, another windlass and yardarm for the crane/bosun's chair, a crow's nest platform, and a f'o'c'sle deck. The sail configuration is intended to resemble that of the 1996 Armada Flagship, but I suppose it could be easily modified to something else if that's too unrealistic. I can post more pictures if anyone wants them, but until then I'd rather keep building, not rendering!

I'm working on a project to design a new Pirate Bay to a "$200, 2500 part" price point as if the Ideas team had decided to keep the model as a large building and a small shipwreck on a large island instead of a large shipwreck and no separate building on a small island. The first thing to do is design the ship that gets wrecked! So here's a ship based off of the 21317 Steamboat Willie hull. It's my first pirate ship build. The rest of the Pirate Bay will come later this week if I have time to work on it. Comments and criticism welcome!

^^ Thanks for your reply. Just to be clear, I'd be looking for a cheap eBay copy of the Gunship with or without figures at as close to RRP as possible. I can't afford a complete set with figures, much less a sealed copy, at Bricklink or eBay prices. That kind of a deal is rare for the Gunship, but not unheard of.

Does anybody here have both the Razor Crest and the 75021 Republic Gunship from 2013? I'm interested in both of them but I'm not sure that I'd find the Razor Crest an adequate substitute for the Gunship, or that getting the Gunship used would quench my interest in the Razor Crest. I can't afford both, and I certainly can't afford the UCS Gunship whenever it comes along, so I'd love to hear what someone who has both has to say about the strengths and weaknesses of each set.

Thanks for such a comprehensive review. This set is way out of my price range but I'm sure it'll make a lot of people happy.

The box says something like 1190 pieces, but it doesn't look like a $120 set to me. In terms of "volume of stuff", it looks like $90 or so. In general, I don't mind it when Lego buildings aren't fully enclosed, as long as they still seem like they have some reasonable depth to them such that they don't just look like a wall. Unfortunately, this elf clubhouse is more of the incomplete facade than the half-building-with-depth that I like. Maybe it's just because the pitch of the roof is so steep that it feels unbalanced in a way a building with a flatter roof doesn't when presented with the same wall depth. But I don't generally buy Winter Village sets anyway, so I'm happy to wait for more pictures before sounding off too much.

That looks much better than I expected. It's a complete, cohesive building with a couple of complete, cohesive side buildings to set the scene - not an Assault-on-Hoth-style jumble of builds that don't go together, nor a Betrayal-on-Bespin-style attempt to cram everything into a single structure at the expense of the quality of the vignettes. I wish I could buy the landspeeder separately; big buildings aren't my thing but I'm a sucker for things that go.

When I was a kid, one of the big differences between Lego and its lower-priced competitors in the US was that 1x1 round plates by Lego were crisp and clean, with no mold marks. Other brands had ugly mold marks on their small plates, but not Lego. Sadly, that's no longer true. At least since late spring of 2019, 1x1 round plates by Lego have often looked as bad as any the clone brands used to make way back when. They were particularly bad in the Moments in Space GWP.

The 10x figure was exaggeration. I don't know what the peak aftermarket price of the set will be. Here are synonyms: NIB, new in box NISB, new in sealed box MIB, mint in box MISB, mint in sealed box Etc