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Here's an Idea that I actually really would like to have myself, as opposed to one I support because I want it to have a chance at review because other people will like it - https://ideas.lego.com/projects/972610de-2516-4abc-818a-49183ef2de1d Mike Mulligan's Steam Shovel! Yes, it's an IP-based build rather than an entirely original idea, but it's a small little thing that's perfectly sized for minifigures, would sit at a low price point (unless it got the same treatment as Steamboat Willie), and could be easily adapted for City or Town builds. And yes, as a little kid and as an adult I did and do like the storybook it comes from.

The setting I imagine for the 1978-79 waves of Classic Space is sort of a Stanley Kubrick moonbase. If a very skilled Hollywood director could make a film in a setting like that with a similar gravitas to 2001 and faithfully incorporate the 78-79 set designs without making it obvious that the production design is based on a forty year old toy line, I'd be happy to see it.

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=30161&idColor=12#T=S&C=12&O={"color":12,"ss":"US","iconly":0} Looks like the windshield introduced for the vintage cars in the Adventurers line, mounted with the hinge at the top instead of the bottom.

^@astral_brick, if you follow the forums for a while you'll see a pretty general consensus that the better measure of value is weight or volume of product, not parts count. I wouldn't necessarily expect the average price per part to decrease with time, because set sales have to cover the development of new parts. With that in mind, I think it remarkable that in real, inflation adjusted terms, the average price per part has actually gone down by about a factor of three over the past forty years. This lets modern sets at the same inflation adjusted price point have three times as many parts for the same bulk as the old Space ships. Aanchir described this phenomenon very well. If we are to make an apples to apples comparison of midrange sets, we must inevitably consider inflation, which leads to that conclusion. Now let's talk about specialized parts in sets of a midrange price point. The only really specialized parts in the droid gunship are the round bricks. These are specialized, yes, but a cursory look at the Bricklink catalog shows they can be used for many things: roofs, floors, wings, flying saucers, many Star Wars and Super Heroes craft, etc. The old midrange spaceships were also full of specialized parts: wedge plates with cutouts that were rarely used for anything besides the noses of small spaceships, large corrugated corner panels that were never used outside Space, Castle panels turned sideways, etc. I really don't see any meaningful difference in rebuild value between modern midrange sets and old ones, and I don't believe raw parts count is the best comparison.

Tiny Turbos: Lego meets Hot Wheels, Hot Wheels wins. The theme sure is distinctive compared to Lego's usual fare, and the unusual scale is kinda fun. Since I'm into air and space rather than tuner cars, it's always been a hard pass for me. 7/10 Next theme (only full themes, unlike Tiny Turbos) - Factory

Please, can we not get into the licensing debate again? The topic title is about midrange sets of transitional skill level. Please give an example of the set size, skill level, or price point you consider midrange or transitional. I'm sure we can then point out any number of current sets that fill those criteria.

I would say that the very set you cite as a counterexample is a very good example of precisely the kind of set that you claim no longer exists. In physical bulk and inflation adjusted price, sets like the Jedi Starfighters, Snowspeeders, and generally the $30 flying machines and spaceships from Star Wars and Super Heroes are a very close match for the old midsize spaceships from the classic Space lines. We can argue about how creative they are all day (the relative merits of licensed and non-licensed lines are a frequent conversation topic on Eurobricks), but I don't think it's reasonable to say that mid-range sets have disappeared.

@Brick Ministry's speed build of 76126 Avengers Ultimate Quinjet has just appeared on YouTube. I never had anything but single-seat flying machines, mostly starfighters, as a kid, so as an adult I'm a sucker for any big airplane, spaceship, or helicopter with multiple seats and a large cargo bay with a polybag-sized build to put in it ... I call these "Galaxy Explorer-class sets." The 2012 Quinjet was an excellent Galaxy Explorer-class set and the 2015 Quinjet had potential to be such, but when they came out I felt like each set made two many sacrifices of general playability in favor of specific play features, resulting in floppy builds that were hard to repurpose for general passenger or cargo carriage without a major rebuild; I didn't get either of them. The 2016 and 2019 single-seat Quinjets are in a different class. I was cautiously optimistic about 76126 before, but having seen the speed build I now think it's the best Quinjet yet. It's a very solid, straightforward, clean build compared to the previous models, with a long, wide, and deep cargo bay/seating area that's unobstructed by fiddly Technic play features and is easily accessed by multiple large roof hatches. Looks like this will probably be my first Quinjet.

BUMP! The contest "Benny's Spaceship Building Academy" sounds like a lot of fun, but I don't have any good ideas for it right now. As I interpret the prompt, it's basically this: put yourself in the shoes of a kid who gets a set that's really pretty good in its own right, but who really just wants a zippy shoot-em-up spaceship. Pretend you're that kid and turn that set into the kind of spaceship you wanted, instead of the set you got. When I was a kid, I got the 7470 Space Shuttle Discovery set. It was a great model of a Space Shuttle, but it wasn't very swooshable for play and it wasn't built for minifigures, so it was only with difficulty that I could fit the astronaut minifigure I begged off a friend behind the windshield. For a while, I had the Shuttle carry a little speeder inside the cargo bay and deploy the speeder to chase bad guys, but after a while that grew so cumbersome that I just tore down the set and rebuilt it into a starfighter (with a few extra parts from other sets). This real-life backstory fits the spirit of the Benny contest, and I'm still pretty proud of the build, so I'm posting it here for your comments and criticism without actually entering the contest. Is that OK?

It doesn't look much like Star Wars to me, but it does look like the ships I've always imagined for another Galactic Empire - the one ruled from Trantor. Either way, it's a nice build.

What a creative take on the classic Galaxy Explorer and Moonbase! Supported!

From a perspective of the logical sequence of real world space exploration it's a bit strange, but there is an ongoing debate about whether to go back to the Moon before going to Mars or whether to go to Mars first, skipping the Moon. I'm in the "Moon first" camp myself. From a Lego perspective, Mars makes a lot more sense because the City Mars subtheme can act as a successor to Life on Mars and Mars Mission, whereas the previous sets with "lunar" or "Moon" in the title are much older. Add to that the fact that Mars is more colorful and the fact that recent fictional productions (The Martian, the National Geographic Channel's miniseries about Mars, the canceled Hulu series "The First") have been about Mars, and it's no surprise in hindsight that the Lego theme would also be about Mars. The fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 has inspired a couple of spectacular nonfiction movies about the Moon, but those aren't exactly interested in merchandising.

That's not Ares V, that's SLS. They ditched the white and black Saturn inspired paint scheme to save weight at the latest design review and reverted to unpainted Shuttle derived insulation for the cryogenic propellant tanks of the core stage.

The Galaxy Explorer is more heavily greebled than I prefer, but I really like the way you furnished the cockpit, with a sideways facing seat for the second crew member and a neat engineering station for a third crew member. It's impressive that you were able to fit such a large engineering station, plus such large tool racks in the back, and still find room for a good sized rover.

I'm so glad Lego got over its grimdark period of the late 2000s, with Inika, Dino Attack, violent Mars Mission, etc. I'll take the cheeky cartoon villains of Nexo Knights and Ninjago any day.

I wouldn't expect any more sets based on TV sitcom locations to get picked for a long time, judging from how many sets based on aviation and space technology have been rejected since the Saturn V passed. Ideas is about new ideas and variety, not necessarily about what the fans want as demonstrated by ten thousand votes.

Looks like the Avengers are getting some help from the Nexo Knights to me!

I imagine these kinds of topics are part of the reason why the company doesn't release sales numbers for specific themes and kits....

As far as I can tell, Lego's brush with bankruptcy in the early 2000s is typically attributed to the following factors, which I list in no particular order: Reckless experimentation with product lines well outside their expertise: full-size dolls with clothing (Scala, Belville, parts of Duplo), action figures with detailed sculpts and simple builds (Galidor), and electronic components included in sets at well below their true cost Reckless proliferation of very large, specialized parts that required relatively expensive molds and were difficult to reuse outside their original context Keeping production of ancillary material (video games, clothing, gear, TV shows) in-house rather than contracting it out Introducing too many new colors too fast External factors like the dot-com bust and other financial pressures that I don't understand If they flirt with failure again, say in the early 2020s, they probably won't make the same mistakes again. Since the early 2000s, they've been pretty disciplined about staying within their core expertise (compare Scala and Friends, for example), experimenting with action figures in a more buildable and sustainable way, and pricing kits with electronic components or other extremely expensive parts at levels that reflect their production costs. They do seem to introduce an awful lot of small, specialized new molds for minifigures and minifigure accessories, but presumably those molds aren't as expensive as molds for the large parts of the late 1990s and early 2000s. They seem to have figured out a profitable, sustainable model for licensing and production of video games, TV shows, and clothing, and they are said to introduce new colors responsibly. Instead, I might expect the following factors, in no particular order, to cause trouble in the future: Overly generous customer support. One of the best things about the company is its customer support, but Aanchir has said that a single customer support call for a kit can wipe out the profits from the sale of that kit. Look at the Finch Dallow/Resistance Bomber fiasco, and imagine how many copies of that kit became losses for Lego. I imagine they'll have to cut back on customer support eventually. Also, are the large (100+ piece) gift-with-purchase sets of the last few years sustainable? Licenses. Yes, I think they've been managed pretty responsibly so far, but there have been a few major duds, and the licensed portion of the portfolio has been growing. While that diversifies the portfolio, a string of spectacular failures could hit the company just as hard as it did twenty years ago. In a sense, this is uncharted territory. Licensing decisions probably weren't a major part of the collapse twenty years ago, but by their sheer ubiquity today they must inevitably be questioned in any future collapse. Bad growth forecasts. We've already seen a contraction in 2016-2018 because of over-expansion; it could happen again. We hope the company's current success isn't a bubble, but it might be. Far too many large toy companies (and companies of all sorts) have failed because they didn't recognize they were riding a bubble and neglected to make contingency plans for a sudden drop in demand. Entrenched competition in emerging markets (eg clone brands in Asia) and emerging competition in established markets (eg competitors staking out Castle, Pirates, etc for themselves in central and eastern Europe). External factors like the global recession which has been teased in the news for several months now. I'd give the company more than five years, but 2016-2018 have certainly showed that they need to be careful in the short term to avoid over-expansion and financial trouble within those five years. Hopefully there's another forty years or more - a well-managed company can stay large and profitable for centuries, after all - but I don't know enough about economics to make any specific prediction about how long it'll last. EDIT - Since a major ongoing debate in these forums is about licenses, original themes, and the current potential or lack thereof for classic themes like Space, Castle, and Pirates, and these questions are frequently cited as support for or against the company's future prospects, it may help to get some historical perspective. As AFOLs, we often complain about one theme or another and say that Lego would do much better if they handled such a theme differently in such a way. Then we say, no, we're not the target audience, it's all about what kids like, etc., etc. But what's the past precedent for "seeing the writing on the wall" from an adult perspective? In hindsight, I date the company's decline to its 2003/2004 nadir to about 1997, when Town became Town Jr, the UFO/Exploriens/Insectoids lines made Space rely even more heavily on extremely large and specialized parts than it had before, and Lego began to invest heavily in video games and gear. That's about seven years of decline before the turnaround. I'd like to ask the forum members who have been adult fans of Lego for thirty or forty years to tell us about how they felt, as adults, about the products of the period 1997-2004 compared to the products of their childhoods, and what they thought at the time about the immediate and mid-term future prospects of the company based on their impressions of those products.

I wouldn't be surprised if they skipped any new Tie fighters for 9 to make room for the two Tie variants from Resistance. After all, they skipped the new A-wing from TLJ to make room for the other starfighter releases of late 2017 and of 2018, of which there were several.

I file instruction books by theme and format (that is, paper size) in a cabinet. I prefer to build sets with paper instructions, but I don't care about them enough to make sure every used set I buy online comes with the instructions. I make sure to download digital instructions for everything, since you never know when an online resource will disappear and the files are as easy to sort in digital form as in physical form.

In turn, it's funny how much those sets (especially the base) resemble the upcoming Playmobil line that Digger of Bricks has linked to in previous pages of this thread.

I think the element with the spring dates back to the 1998 Competition subtheme of Technic. The projectile used at that time had a hemispherical head about three studs wide. That was replaced by the current projectile in 2007, allowing the shooter to be used in smaller spaces, like the underside of the 2007 Naboo Starfighter.

When I was a kid the only three superheroes I knew about were Batman, Spider-Man, and Superman ....

Huh - I guess 10194 Emerald Night must have been intended to emulate the Flying Scotsman as closely as possible within the constraints of price point, Lego set build standards, intended audience (Lego fans and train fans who don't care too much about the details), and the lack of a license to make the Flying Scotsman itself. Being approximately as familiar with the Space Shuttle as many train fans are with the Emerald Night, I would say that Emerald Night (the unlicensed Flying Scotsman without a British Railways logo, at a price point of $100 and a part count of about 1000) is about as accurate/inaccurate as the Shuttle Adventure (the unlicensed Space Shuttle from the same year without a NASA logo, at a price point of $100 and a part count of about 1000).