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I'm quite fond of Creator 3-in-1, actually. I think of it as a slightly more advanced version of City, more than as a distinct theme in its own right, but its series of minifig scaled airplanes and boats over the last few years has been outstanding. I also appreciate the mini-scale and midi-scale cars and aircraft like those in this year's shuttle transporter. I admit I'm not particularly interested in the brick built animals or most of the buildings, but I think they're nice sets that demonstrate the ideals of Lego very well, and I'm glad they sell consistently enough to earn a place in the product line year after year.

If you want modern space sets with enclosed cockpits capable of surviving atmospheric entry, get 75970 and 75975, with some astronaut minifigures from Bricklink. They're fantastic sets that perfectly straddle the line between realistic and fantastic spaceships, if you can get over the fact that they're from a licensed theme.

^ I don't think RogerSmith was making any grand pronouncement about the absolute worth of Medium Azure as a color, just saying he doesn't like it. That's OK. We're each allowed to like and dislike different colors, and to like them more or less in different contexts! For instance, I like yellow-orange shades in brick but I think they're awful in carpet. Back on topic, I've avoided getting any of the Modular Buildings because I don't have a lot of display space, and it takes a lot of time to assemble and dismantle each of them. At thirty to fifty percent the size of a Modular Building, the upcoming Creator set looks like something I could probably handle and like something that would fit in with my childhood town a lot better. Maybe I'll get it? That decision will have to wait for better pictures.

I don't think the builder of this castle meant to imply that it's a historically accurate recreation of a particular castle in Lowenstein. I think he meant that it's a historically accurate interpretation of a generic European or German castle of the High Middle Ages, insofar as the architecture and furnishings are plausible. I think he just liked the name Lowenstein.

Sorry to bump an old topic, but I think this question is relevant - It seems to me that Flickr has become much less stable since the Smugmug deal. Since that deal went through, I have frequently seen "Bad Panda" error notices when attempting to load pages on Flickr, and I don't remember any of those before Yahoo sold the site. Of course, I haven't been keeping records of this, so my memory may be more at fault than Flickr, but I'd like to know if anyone else has had the same experience.

Is it just me, or do the Mars sets, except maybe the big rocket base, have Mark Stafford written all over them? For example, compare the small set with just the little shuttle and the spaceship in the Alien Conquest mobile base. In his Bricklist notes to Watchpoint Gibraltar, Stafford talks about how he was so glad to design a spaceship again, since it had been a few years since the last one. He must be having a pretty good year by now!

I didn't mean that the roller coaster and carousel in Creator Three-in-One are part of the Creator Expert Fairground subtheme, I meant that Creator Three-in-One now also seems to have a fairground subtheme. I thought that was pretty clear. Sorry for not making that clear.

Hmm...I've been waiting for these pictures in order to plan my summer purchases, so here's what I think so far. On the one hand, I'm disappointed by the simplicity and lack of realism in some of the builds. I don't really like the rover or the large shuttle. On the other hand, aren't sets like this exactly what you and I have been wanting for years? I've mentally committed to buying the whole line months ago, the only question has been whether or not to also get the 2011 City Space line and this summer's Sluban Mars line. I was really hoping that the Lego line would be so similar to the Sluban line that I wouldn't want both, but it looks like that'll be my first clone brand purchase, despite the fact that I'll also get the Lego sets. The large rocket is pretty cool. I'm surprised to see just how explicitly it's a minifig playscale version of SLS; I didn't expect Lego to do that. The set titled Moon Base in Brickset is definitely the highlight of the line: it's an orbital space station loosely modeled on the Deep Space Gateway/Lunar Orbital Platform, in Lego, for minifigs! That's definitely breaking new ground for Lego! A must buy for sure. I've been holding off on buying extra copies of 31066 Shuttle Explorer in case the Moonbase and Rover from the summer sets were basically rehashed of the B and C models from that set, but that's not the case at all. Finally, I expected to see the white NASA torso that leaked a few days ago in a commemorative minifig in one of the City sets. I don't, so now what I'm cautiously hoping for is that the unknown Creator Expert vehicle code named Discovery and numbered 10269 might be an Apollo Lunar Module, despite the rumors that it's a Harley Davidson motorcycle. Of course, that's just wish-listing right there. All in all, it'll be an expensive summer!

1: It's interesting to see the Fairground subtheme of Creator Expert being carried over into Creator Three in One. 2: Although I've liked the Modular Buildings I've seen in person well enough, I haven't felt the urge to buy any myself. This summer's Creator Three in One building is a real return to form for Creator Three in One buildings, though, and it's quite possible I may buy it at some point. 3: I've enjoyed every Creator Three in One minifig scale aircraft since 2015, and this is certainly a worthy entry in the line!

The mech is amazing. The Land Bounty looks ... well, it's not my cup of tea, but it looks a lot like the kind of bonkers Mad Max-style vehicles introduced into Lego last year with the Dieselnaut and prototyped for TLM2. Maybe the Land Bounty is one reason why none of those were approved as set releases. Doesn't look too bad to me, considering.

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.