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Nah, those two builds are different enough that I have no trouble believing there's no connection. I bet the Creator Expert team had no idea that Ideas project existed.

I built the new Y-wing tonight. I like the design of the Resistance Y-wing because it fits so well with the Rebellion model, so I can think of it as one of the Y-wing variants that were mentioned in the Dorling Kindersley cross-section book but never seen onscreen. The fronts of the engines are nice impressions of the sensor antennae that normally remain beneath white domes. Since these would fit under the domes, they're a pretty great design. The new method of attaching the engine extensions is clever, but I'm not quite sure it's legal, that is that it doesn't stress the parts with imprecise geometry. The body of the ship is solid and rigid, with surface texture that is satisfactorily detailed and different than three detailing on the Rebel model. I really like the fact that the ion cannons can elevate. Built as instructed, they can't point forward at zero elevation, but it's trivial to fix that. The landing gear is tall and unobtrusive, and the spring shooters are placed where they're easy to use and not too conspicuous. The new cockpit captures the sleek shape of the Y-wing nose cone better than any previous model, but I miss the brick-built stripes of the previous model. The Walmart price of $56 is a bit higher than it could be, but not bad. The RRP of $70 is way too high. Unfortunately, a minifig that's not wearing a helmet with a huge bump in the back (like Zori Bliss) can't sit in the cockpit without rattling around because the seating square is entirely tiled. It's possible to replace the tiles at the back of the seating square with plates, but the tiles at the front can't be replaced with plates because they're half of part 33909, and that part is placed inside part 43713 in such a way that it can't be removed with the brick separator. That's a design flaw that shouldn't have made it out of product testing. Don't they take sets apart and put them back together in the testing phase? That's where 90% of the fun is for me, ever since I got my first Lego spaceship.

Cloth sails are much better. I generally prefer brick-built solutions to prefab solutions for nearly everything, but sails should be able to flap about, billow in the wind, and swell up if you hold a little fan behind them. Brick-built sails are heavy and inflexible. They add a large amount of weight, cost, and complexity without improving accuracy or play; in fact, they hinder play because you can't roll them up. If brick-built sails were generally desirable I think we'd see them widely adopted by the shipbuilding community in the Pirates forum, but 99% of MOCs there - even/especially the most complex and detailed ones - opt for cloth sails. Edit - The only reasons nearly every ship on Ideas has brick built sails are because there aren't usable sails in most digital building programs and because sails would probably count as new elements, which are against the rules. But if a sailing ship from Ideas was selected for production, I'm sure the Ideas team would finagle a way to get cloth sails, much as they gave the Flintstones car a cloth roof. Besides, the Sea Cow is the only large playscale ship with brick built sails, so it sets a precedent but not a pattern.

Ok, so if all you object to in "system scale" is the word "scale", can you please stop insisting everybody stop using that word? The purpose of language is to describe things such that everyone knows what is being described. Regardless of pedantic disputes over how to parse the word "scale" here, everyone knows what "system scale" means: built for play with minifigs. Can we move on? To summarize everything that has been said in this thread: 1) Minifigs have weird proportions. 2) Building to a mathematical scale means picking one aspect of a minifig as a reference and pegging that to some real world size. 3) Some specialized parts designed for minifigs suggest a height-based scale of about 1:43, if a minifig is six feet tall. 4) Some set designers have spoken of using scales closer to 1:50. 5) Some fan builders use different height, width, and length scales. 6) Other fan builders use scales that "average" the minifig proportions in some sense. For example, my 1 stud = 1 foot scale is about 1:39. 7) There is no single scale in sets, but a range of scales and sizes depending on the subject and goals for the play experience and building experience. Sets designed for minifig interaction use a variety of scales. 8) Sets and builds designed for minifig interaction without being built to a scale factor in the range of numbers reasonably derived from a minifig are "system scale" or "play scale." 9) That may not be a correct use of the word scale from some perspectives, but language is a flexible thing. If enough people use "scale" this way, then it's a perfectly valid sense of the word.

The canopy is just a couple of 3x6x1 trans yellow slopes cleverly put together. There's a detail picture of the cockpit module of the prior version on his Flickr, it might be possible to reverse engineer it from that.

Granted, it's not a change that's been applied across the board to every car in City. There are still plenty of four-wide cars in City, and there were one or two six-wide City cars before Speed Champions. I don't think it's a stretch, though, to speculate that the several six-wide police cars and sports cars in City since 2015 have been intended to go with Speed Champions cars better than their four-wide counterparts do.

When Speed Champions started out in 2015, its six-stud wide standard was much larger and more detailed than the four-stud wide standard single-seat cars in City. Once it was clear that Speed Champions was a big hit, single-seat cars in City started to use the six-stud wide standard in order to mix better with the Speed Champions cars for play. (A four-stud wide police car doesn't have a change of outrunning a six-stud wide Ferrari, so the City cops got bigger cars to catch the speeders.) I wonder if City will upgrade to the eight-wide standard in a few years?

I'm glad that they're working hard and bringing new ideas to Speed Champions each year, but as of now I don't like the 8-wide look. That will make Speed Champions vehicles even less compatible with City, and it'll probably bump the base price from fifteen USD to twenty. In my view, the only time you need an eight wide vehicle is if you're going to fit two people side by side, but I doubt that seating arrangement will come standard. Still, that big ugly new chassis piece has studs on the side and has five studs inside the center section, so it's possible it may be designed for side by side seating. Edit - that six wide windshield is nice though, should really improve six wide car MOCs. Edit, just saw the Brothers Brick article. It says that one of the reasons for the eight wide design language is to allow side by side seating and that the Jaguar has two seats in front AND two more in back! That's a seating arrangement I've wanted in a Lego car since I was about ten ... TAKE MY MONEY!

@Viper Knight, this isn't the right thread to wishlist about Halo licenses. There are dedicated wishlist threads for that in the Licensed forum. Nor is it the right thread to wishlist about themes like space mercenaries and the parts for them. This thread is about Ideas projects and products. I don't understand what the second and third lines of your last post mean, but they're clearly irrelevant to this thread. Back on topic - That train station is big, but like many Ideas projects implemented as digital builds it relies too heavily on long-obsolete parts in colors that were never produced. All the big glass pieces and the big tan arches fit that description. As a rule, I don't support projects like that, because it shows the designer isn't thinking realistically about production and any retail version would necessarily be drastically redesigned.

Hi, @Aanchir! It's nice to have you back. I appreciate every effort you make to articulate your thoughts in a rational, well-supported manner and to keep discussions positive and respectful. Everything you say about the amount of representation of various themes and careers in Town and City is accurate, but I also agree with @pooda's assessment that the large annual presence of various police and exploration subthemes can overshadow the variety of other occupations in Lego City, such that it can seem like there aren't as many general, everyday kinds of jobs. @pooda: Some people do have time to read and write long-form posts; that's why the post entry box has such rich capabilities for text formatting, picture display, and other functions. Personally, I don't usually put in the effort to write a long response to most threads, but I always appreciate people who do. Long posts help me learn things about Lego I didn't know before, and also help me appreciate attitudes, perceptions, and cultures I wouldn't otherwise be aware of. That's what makes Eurobricks a forum. It's not just about agreeing or disagreeing with what people say. That can be accomplished with Like and Dislike buttons, as on Facebook. It's also about contributing to a discussion and showing why you think what you think. Mods - I hope this isn't mini-modding? If it is, please let me know. Thanks.

OK, just checking. For a moment there I thought you were asking for the classic themes to repeat themselves every 3 years in the same way Star Wars does, in such a way as to get a refreshed Galaxy Explorer every few years, etc. That sounded out of character for you.

Thanks a lot for making this list. There are all sorts of great things to build here if I can ever find the time!

1) Do YOU really want a remake of the exact same Galaxy Explorer every three years? 2) Take that up with pop culture, not with Lego.

Just chiming in to say that one thing that makes Millennium Falcon and X-wing remakes more viable than pirate ship remakes is their relative lack of specialized parts. For a Star Wars ship, you need a bunch of basic bricks, slopes, and wedges that can be and are used for a wide variety of builds across every theme, along with canopy glass that is also easily reusable. The only really specialized parts you need are minifigure headgear and accessories, and every theme seems to get plenty of those nowadays. By contrast, a pirate ship needs large prefab hulls, masts, and sails, plus sharks and rowboats to go with it. That makes pirate ships more expensive to produce and requires their basic structure to be reused more often to recoup costs. Plus, without a clear reference point the improvements between subsequent releases aren't as immediately apparent for pirate ships. Even kids can be drawn in as repeat buyers of Star Wars ships if they remain interested in Lego for the length of one refresh cycle, because any kid who follows Star Wars media can (for example) tell the difference between the 3-wide engines and old-style canopy on the 2012 X-wing and the 4-wide engines and new-style canopy on the 2018 X-wing. I also wish we got more sailing ships, but from a production and design standpoint the Star Wars refresh cycle is clearly more practical than the pirate ship refresh cycle.

Thanks for posting. I like the new airlock and center module, and especially the lower frame and the legs.

City sets with two or three vehicles are already pretty common. Are you proposing that Lego sell larger sets with, say, six to ten vehicles of different kinds at a price point of $100-150? They could certainly do that, but I'd prefer it if those vehicles were split up into individual sets and sold separately, ie as Great Vehicles, or the way Speed Champions cars are sold. They're more affordable that way and you can still collect them all if you want. I guess what I'm trying to say is that no, it doesn't seem like a good idea as described above. Maybe you could say what you mean in more detail? The City Garage set from 2011 or 2012 had four or five little cars and a parking garage, and that was a pretty cool set. Is that the kind of thing you're trying to describe?

A couple nights ago I had a dream in which next year's set catalog had leaked and there were pictures of an awesome starbase with a new 924-style spaceship. Then last night it was a similar dream except they were new Arctic-styled sets. Guess if I'm having these kinds of dreams I should get out of the house and get some more fresh air, huh?

I've had a recurring dream ever since I was about 10, maybe 11, where I'm in a large store (usually a big-box toy store, usually empty of other shoppers - sometimes a department store, sometimes busy), and it has shelves upon shelves of sealed copies of old retired sets (mostly 2001 Toa and 1999 Star Wars) being sold at or below their original retail price. In the dream, it's tremendously exciting because I never thought I was going to be able to get those sets, but I'm never able to make it to the checkout line before the dream ends; when I wake up I'm disappointed to realize I didn't get that set after all. I think these dreams have two primary roots. First is my parents giving my brother the X-wing and me the Naboo Fighter in 1999 instead of the other way around, and second is my mom's attempt in 2002 to get us to promise never to buy Lego ever again because it's expensive and it was time to grow out of it, following which my brother and I basically begged our cousins (who had more pocket money) to buy the 2002 Toa for us. That these dreams still persist is attributable, I think, to the way they encapsulate the general anxiety of the things one's always wanted being forever just out of reach. If they were really about the Lego sets involved they should have stopped after I bought those sets on eBay ....

I just use the simple rule that 1 foot = 1 stud. It's not very scientific but it's close enough for me when building airplanes and spaceships. I've tried building cars to that scale but I'm never satisfied with the results, because it's important to me that a minifig fits inside while sitting upright. Eventually I just gave up on building cars ....

In the US the Arocs RRP was $230 for approx 2700 parts including PF and pneumatics, the Land Rover is $200 for approx 2500 parts without PF or pneumatics. Seems fair to me. The overall part count isn't that much less, so the PF and pneumatics accounted for the $30 extra in the Arocs compared to the Defender.

It seemed pretty daring and new to me at the time. Fantasy Era Castle came at a time when Lego was experimenting with much more open violence in its play themes, from the 2006 "gritty reset" of Bionicle to Exo Force, Batman, and World Racers. Fantasy Era was the first time when there were grotesque monsters in open warfare in Castle, among other things. Compare the scary skeletons and skeleton horses of Fantasy Era to the tame smiling skeletons of Pirates and recall the anecdote where, sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, one of the Kristiansens threatened to fire a set designer for daring to suggest that a castle dungeon should have a skeleton in it. Ten years later, with the proliferation of bigfigs and alien monsters through the Super Hero and Ninjago themes, Fantasy Era doesn't seem so unusual. But in 2007 it was a bold new direction.

Here in the USA the 75175 released in 2017 for $40 and the 75248 will cost $30, but your point is still good. The X-wings released in 2015, 2016, and 2018 are good models and fun sets, but at $80 US RRP I'm not sure they're $20 better than the 2012 model, which was only slightly smaller and less detailed at $60. I'm having a hard time imagining how they could bump up the January 2020 X-wing to $90 with improvements to the ship itself, though side builds like a relatively large maintenance vehicle or a building could easily do that.

That works for small-medium ships like the Jedi Interceptor and Vulture Droid in 2005, but the starfighters have mostly moved into such high price brackets that I think it would really hurt sales to package them together. (Back in 2016 that strategy was blamed for hurting sales of 75150 with the Rebels A-wing and the TIE Advanced). I'll buy an X-wing and a TIE Fighter packaged separately, but I'll wait for a 20% discount on each. Total is $150 minus the discounts, but those are reliable. In contrast, the $100+ sets are rarely discounted by Amazon or Walmart or Lego itself, so a two pack of large modern starfighters would cost more than two single ships, and a three pack would be even more expensive. Two packs work fine if the total price is still moderate, which means you have to keep them to small ships like Jedi fighters and A-wings.

Hope that means you're doing number four.