icm

I got my two 75413 CTTs (eBay, ~$65 each, no figures) yesterday afternoon and built them last night. Hopefully I'll have time to make them into the Classic Space moonbus and flatbed cargo rover pretty soon. For $65 each, they're not bad builds, but they certainly don't look or feel "large" the way a CTT should. The wheels don't roll well on a smooth tabletop, and the turning function doesn't work well on the tabletop either. I'm sure they would be much better on a floor with low carpet, just enough for some traction. The wheels were the most repetitive Lego building experience I've ever had. I have a pretty high tolerance for repeated or mirrored subassemblies (I like bilateral symmetry in builds, it makes it much easier to build wings etc in parallel), but each wheel has a subassembly repeated twice, so I had to build that particular subassembly 40 times for 20 wheels for 2 tanks with 10 wheels each. That PaB experiment is interesting. Because PaB is less automated than the production of retail sets, the price-per-part of a build through PaB will always be higher than the price-per-part of a retail set. Except here? I'm not too surprised to hear that a build of ~800 pieces comes out to ~$110 on PaB instead of ~$80, but that's a real sad comment on how blatantly Lego is price-gouging with this set by retailing it at $160. The problem with hoping for big discounts on big sets in the US is it's always hit-or-miss. You have to be going to Walmart or Target all the time to see those discounts and grab them. I rarely go into the store, so I have to rely on online discounts and those are rarely above 20%, and big sets rarely even get 20% discounts online. I finished piecing together the 2016 Rebels version of the TIE Advanced (not the TIE Advanced Prototype) a few months ago. It's still a good build that holds up very well today, but the proportions are a little different than the ANH version, and new parts could improve some of the details and shaping. I would be pretty excited about a new TIE Advanced next year.

Same. I spent way too much money on the Bluebrixx Star Trek sets, which are great, but Lego parts quality is still much better and Lego minifigs are much better than Bluebrixx minifigs (which were never available for purchase anyway). Fingers crossed the shuttle GWP is as good as the Type 6 Shuttle MOC by Lilium Brick Yards. I would 100% buy every single Star Trek subject/scale I've bought from Bluebrixx again from Lego, because the parts quality and building experience is so much better. Granted, the Bluebrixx sets have more and better prints than is typical from Lego today, but for me good parts are more important than good prints for a good experience overall.

Turtle Who? Is @Dolor the Fourth Turtle?

It'll be $120 by then and it'll be a buildable Redbird(?) motorcycle with a Miniland-scale Robin figure with a flat, soulless face. And no pupils, for some reason.

Airplanes all look the same, cars all look the same, Batmobiles all look the same. If you desperately need a Batmobile, why not put a black knight minifig inside a black City car and call it good? One minifig in a car has exactly the same play utility as another minifig in a car, as long as you have a little imagination.

Apparently I annoyed someone on Brickset with my idea of using the CTT as a Classic Space Moonbus and cargo rover. I was only going to do it if I could find the set for half price or less without minifigs, and it wasn't a priority. I looked on eBay today and saw someone selling it, two copies, in hand, without minifigs, for $60 each, so I bought them. Enough non-LAN youtubers and ordinary people on Reddit have been able to buy the August sets before the street date that I think this is probably just an ordinary person buying it at Target just for the minifigs and selling off the build without price gouging, but I'm always a little wary about buying new sets on eBay. What does Eurobricks think?

The laser cannon parts and the 6x12 wedge plates introduced in 1999 are still used on the Force Burner Snowspeeder.

Half a Death Star for $1000. Ned Leeds is dropping his $500 playset Death Star in surprise when he hears about this.

In these potato pictures it kinda looks like Han has a new hair piece. Does it look that way to anyone else?

That's a brand new sentence, especially when it comes to Lego sets.

In my opinion, the 2006 Arkham is the only bad one. The 2017 one looks great and has a really good police car. But then, you can tell I'm mostly interested in Arkham Asylum for the side build vehicles. The ambulances in the 2006 and 2013 models, the police car in the 2017 set, the panel van in the 2025 set. I want to just Bricklink the parts for each of them, but I haven't had time.

Now rumored for January, a Technic version of the SLS rocket at $60. I wonder what Technic function will be its selling point besides simply being able to remove the boosters and the upper stage. Rockets really aren't known for their moving parts. (High performance liquid propellant rocket engines can be very complex, but this isn't a model of a rocket engine with spinning turbopumps, etc.)

It does look pretty good. Nice solid character selection, a decent Modular-compatible building, and a nice vehicle side build. I hope I can Bricklink the panel van (it's a really neat white panel van), but I haven't found the time yet to Bricklink hardly any of the other interesting side-build vehicles from large sets (e.g. the truck from the Cullen house), so it'll be better if I can get it separately on eBay or at B&M.

Eh, wouldn't it be better to list those as owned on your Brickset account and then post a link to your collection? Saves space, is more visually interesting, information-rich, feature-rich than a plaintext list of set numbers. More fun for you too.

Happy to see the Spider-car is only $20 this time. I paid the full $25 RRP for the Miles/Morb-mobile but then with the other Spider-cars (Petey-car, Cop-car, Venom-car) I got them secondhand without the rest of the set for cheap. I might end up getting the whole set this time when it hits 20% off.

Edit - never mind.

The First Order AT-ST was pretty bad, but it's in a different size and price class for the purposes of this comparison.

To be precise, they made a large-scale Bat-Pod scaled to the large-scale Tumbler (it uses the same tires, as it should). The buildable figure is actually much too large for the Bat-Pod or the Tumbler, but the scale mismatch is acceptable for play purposes.

True, the new CTT makes even the Justifier look like a good deal. I didn't think anything could make the Justifier look like a good set at a good price, but here we are.

The set from Space Police 1 that I'd most like to see a remake of is the Spy-Trak 1 rover (6895). Imagine a Spy-Trak 1 remake and a Battrax remake (6941) playing cat-and-mouse or spy-vs-spy in the forbidding extraterrestrial terrain of the living room :)

75288 was $160 on release in 2020 but it was bumped to $170 in 2022.

Would the hype be crazy? This sounds to me like a classic case of "the grass is greener on the other side"-type thinking, or spinning castles in the air. It's easy to talk about a hypothetical scenario that would be so great and so exciting, but the reality usually is that when our dreams come true they're ... pretty mundane, or worse, they don't turn out like we want them to. Remember how quickly the hype for the Prequel Trilogy turned to hate when it didn't meet people's expectations! Ditto for the Sequel Trilogy! Chances are, any hypothetical rebooted Lego Star Wars theme after a two-year hiatus would start strong for a year or two (Lego seems to give new themes higher budgets in their first year or two), then quickly be more remakes and overpriced sets. You would wonder, why did they make this ship instead of that one, why did they price it this high instead of this much lower, what even is this other character or vehicle from new media that I haven't seen yet? When Pirates took six years off between 2009 and 2015 (or four years off between 2011 and 2015, if you count PotC), the hype was there for a new Pirates theme but the Lego community found the sets disappointing and they were more or less a flop. When Bionicle took five years off between 2010 and 2015 (with Hero Factory taking its place in between), the hype was strong for its return, but G2 Bionicle was a major flop and is not remembered fondly. Just taking time off between release years to build hype is far from a surefire move to bring back excitement for a fresh start to a newly sustainable theme.

Here's the secret: without inside sales data, it's ALL lazy takes to get tired of, including the one I was responding to. "I'd buy the heck out of theme Y, therefore if they replaced theme X with theme Y it would sell like gangbusters" is just as lazy of a take. And now we're back retreading the familiar SW-Space rivalry for the umpteenth time.

Unfortunately, the short shelf life of the Blacktron Renegade and the relegation of the Galaxy Explorer and the CS'24 sets to clearance aisles seems like a counterexample to that rosy picture.

I suppose it would have to be the V-19. It's the starfighter-size build that has the least flaws and best price overall, even though it doesn't dominate any category of comparison. The Ahsoka Eta-2 is heavily overpriced, the U-wing is great if you use one of the no-extra-parts rebuilds on Rebrickable but is very flawed according to the instructions in the box, the ARC-170 has bad proportions and dinky wing guns, and the Jango Fett Slave I is just kind of boring, in my opinion. So the V-19 is the only one in the starfighter playset class without major flaws, even though the price is a little higher than I'd like and there's no wing synchronization or landing gear. (The Slave I has no major flaws either, I just think it's boring. It's not a very swooshable shape even with the handle on the back, and I don't like the way the minifigs are stuffed in the cockpit, though I recognize there's no other way to fit them both in.) Honorable mention to the brick-built logo. While it's an 18+ display set with no playability whatsoever, it is incredibly well done, it looks great, and the price is decent.