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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).

Such a fine bust here. The mass, form, color balance, texture, studded/smooth balance, shapes of the beard, hat, nose, eyes, etc., are all perfect.

Hi, nice to meet you. I had an uncle whose Air Force career, I'm told, had something to do with satellite tracking, but he wasn't very close to my mom and dad so I really don't know what he did. There's another uncle whose Air Force career, I'm told, has something to do with teaching courses somehow related to satellites on base somewhere in Mississippi, but I don't know him either. I'm a grad student studying astrodynamics and space navigation, but that's not likely to lead to an Air Force career in satcom. Do you mind saying a little bit more about your career path - what you do every day, what kinds of math and software you use regularly, how you came to be a satellite communications operator? It sounds fascinating. PS - the Lego collection looks pretty good too. That Black Seas Barracuda is still the best Lego pirate ship ever made, and I want one too!

All this talk of blue (but different shades of blue!) and white, with transparent canopies, reminds me of Galaxy Squad. In a previous thread I said I didn't like that theme and I never would, but I ended up buying two of the smaller Galaxy Squad sets a few months ago and I liked them a lot. Like x105Black, I prefer trans-clear, trans-black, or trans-light blue canopies, as they're more versatile in settings outside Space or Sci-Fi. I guess I'm really not too particular about the color scheme for future Space themes, just the content. Let's have a straight exploration theme without a lot of guns and bad guys, with nice sturdy builds that don't fall apart when you sneeze like those from Exploriens and Life on Mars, which were the last straight exploration themes without guns and bad guys.

I get nervous around messes, so I always build sets in one sitting as fast as I can. Then I'm stiff by the end and sorry that I didn't take the time to enjoy the clever parts of the build and learn how the mechanisms work. What I need is a dedicated building table on which to safely leave incomplete models between building sessions. I agree that one's skill as a builder is probably not correlated with how long one takes to build a new set for the first time.

This is a really cool rover! I like the use of the X-wing canopy and the slopes you've put around it, the headlights and intake on the front, the greebling on the back, the equipment on the top of the rear half, the big red wheels and red tires, the way the suspension looks - just about everything except the fact that the wheels don't spin freely. If you modify them to spin freely, I just might have to give this build a try in Studio. By the way, the whole thing looks ten times better than the source material.

Hi, Modeltrainman - Is this the result of the thread you posted on Bricklink a couple of months ago, asking for advice in neo Classic Space builds and whether or not to just build your own thing? If so, thanks for posting. If not, thanks for posting anyway. This is a fun idea and I can tell you've worked hard on it, but you haven't posted enough pictures to Ideas to let anyone really get a good look at it. Could you post some pictures showing the ship from different angles, such as the side, top, front, back, and various three-quarter views? Maybe someone else on this forum can give you better feedback based on this single picture.

This is a good-looking build. I like the colors and the overall shape, and I agree that it looks more like a luxury yacht than a research vessel. I think it needs some work before you think about uploading it to Ideas, though. First, it uses obsolete parts, particularly hinges. Those would be replaced by modern hinges in the Ideas design process, but it's probably a good idea to use modern parts now so that it looks like you've thought a bit more about what this would be like as a retail set. Second, it has virtually no interior furnishings. I would expect a production set with that much interior volume to be absolutely packed with furnishings and play features, especially one derived from such an AFOL-centric source as Ideas. Third, I don't see any techniques for structural stability, such as Technic frames or braces. The glazed center section looks especially fragile. Rebuilding this around a sturdy Technic frame would also help you get ideas for what furnishings and play features can fit in the interior, and how best to incorporate them. Take all these comments with a grain of salt, since I certainly haven't built anything this large and complex in Studio, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. Good work, and good luck.

That's a fun little build, thanks for posting. The usual thing to do is to open a free account on Flickr, upload your images there, and post them here simply by copy-pasting the URL into the post window. The forum software will automatically convert the URL into a picture that, if clicked, takes you back to the Flickr source.

The idea that a revival of "classic theme X" would sell well "if done properly" is a typical "no true Scotsman" argument: No Scotsman fails to wear his kilt on Wednesdays. My uncle Angus, born and bred in Edinburgh, never wears his kilt. No true Scotsman fails to wear his kilt on Wednesdays. A Space/Castle/Pirates revival would be very successful if done properly. The last Space/Castle/Pirates revival was pretty short-lived and didn't sell very well. The last Space/Castle/Pirates revival wasn't handled well because of this and this and this....

^^ I thought my post was pretty clear. None of the major competitors (Mega, Cobi, Hasbro) has an original Space theme. They compete with Star Wars by getting licenses of their own. I infer that they consider those more likely to profitably compete against Star Wars than an original Space theme. I imagine that Lego will have another little Space renaissance after Episode 9 and before the Rian Johnson trilogy, like it did after Episode 3 and before the trilogy in progress today.

Exactly. The company has nothing to gain and everything to lose by dropping the license, even if we concede the presence of an enormous pent up demand for original Space sets. If the license allows the line to take a break, I'm not opposed to the idea of a year or two without Star Wars, but it would be a really bad idea for Lego to take a year off from it without such a condition in the license. Despite my familiarity with the AFOL forums, I'm not convinced such Space demands exist in the general audience for Lego and other brick brands. If they did, Mega Construx would have a competing line of original Space sets. Instead, Mega and Hasbro/Kre-O compete with licensed Halo and Star Trek lines, apart from an occasional one off model like Mega's Mars rover. Perhaps the best evidence right now that an in-house Space theme wouldn't sell well against Star Wars is the fact that nobody else is doing it.

Uh-oh. How did the bot get past the registration captcha? Hope this doesn't mean there's a wave of spam on the way.

Yes, the transparent yellow window panel is real. I restrict my digital builds to real part/color combinations and try to use modern parts wherever possible. Unfortunately, this panel hasn't been released in that color since the 1980s. I'd rather use 1x2x2 panels in transparent yellow, but they don't exist.