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Best theme: Ninjago, runner-up Star Wars. The Hunted subtheme has a memorable design language and great dragons, and the Sons of Garmadon subtheme has a splendid Temple of Resurrection. Both waves show Ninjago's unique ability to reinvent itself with each wave without losing its identity. Star Wars is thematically boring in 2018, mostly remakes of one kind or another, but the sets themselves are really solid: the new X-wing, Jedi Starfighter, Tie Fighter, UCS Y-wing, the Resistance Ski Speeder ... There are a few clunkers, but the line as a whole was well curated and well designed this year. Best minifigs: No comment, I don't pay much attention to minifigs. Best set: UCS Y-wing. It's incredibly well detailed and well proportioned, and it's more swooshable than many sets a fraction of its size. Worst theme:. DC Super Heroes. Maybe minifig collectors like these sets, but they just look like ugly shapeless messes to me. Worst minifig: No comment, I don't pay much attention to minifigs. Most anticipated: The TLM2 classic space battle pack is pretty cool, but I'll actually have to say the 4+ X-wing. It looks so much like the makeshift X-wings I tried to build when I was 6 that I can't pass it up!

I'm glad to see you've finally ordered the parts for Benny's space command center. I look forward to pictures of the real build! But the dark red roof clashes with the walls; I preferred it in black.

Just a small thought: the plain tan ground in the box art for the Apocalypseburg sets looks a lot like the plain tan ground in the box art for the 1980s space sets, and the purplish ground in the box art for the sets with Rex Dangervest looks like the purplish ground in the box art for the 1990s space sets. Is that an intentional reference to old space sets? Probably not. It just made me smile, that's all.

Yes, the rim of the new helmets is a little thicker than the rim of the vintage helmets, but it's not a dramatic difference. The important thing is that the shape of the helmet on the top and rear, and the shape of the visor opening, deliberately mimic the vintage helmets. It's close enough to look the same, whereas when they've reissued Classic Space minifigs before they've used the standard modern helmet, which bulges at the back.

A few months ago I posted a digital build of a simple little X-wing inspired by the makeshifts I built as a kid when my big brother had the 1999 X-wing and I didn't. I'm still gonna build that in real life sometime, but this 4+ model is actually a much better match to what I was aiming for back then. So if I've bought every other minifig X-wing for my twelve-year-old self, I'm buying this one for my six-year-old self.

Gee, @danth, your dream came true! Re-released old-style Classic Space helmets! - Speaking of Classic Space, I think the two little CS-style spaceships in these sets are a much better fit with the 1979-1987 sets than the Benny Spaceship from TLM1. I think I'd rather have two little CS-style spaceships that really fit in than a big ship that doesn't, and I'm happy to see that the big spaceship in the line is something as patently absurd and creative as a dropship piloted by two velociraptors.

Price point. Same car for half the price gets everyone who wanted the huge Porsche the first time but couldn't afford it. If the first one sold really well (and it did), then this one will make lots of money too. Same reason why Star Wars and even Speed Champions have returned to the same subject repeatedly. Whether we want the Technic theme to adopt the same repeat cycle as those licensed themes is another matter. It's been on the unlicensed repeat cycle of similar generic subjects for years, like City, so it's not like a retread of similar material after a couple years is new for the theme.

Here are some examples of fan builds that are relatively "small" as these things go, and therefore achievable to copy. Any church building that can fit 100 minifigs is going to be really big, so I wish you the best of luck planning and executing your build. I've enclosed them in a quote so that people with slow Internet connections don't have to load the pictures if they don't want to. Click on any image to go to the source on Flickr; there will probably be more images to help you plan your build by example.

@ks6349, what you need to do is search for Lego churches on Flickr and build your own. There is no set like what you want and never has been, but there are many, many church builds on Flickr - it's a thriving subgenre of Castle, landscape, and Town building.

It looks like the new City road plates are light grey instead of dark grey. That's perfect for a Classic Space moonbase, considering that we haven't had light gray road plates since the mid-80s and we haven't had lunar landing plates since 1979. I think I'll have to buy three or four straight plates to serve as a lunar runway for the Overwatch rocket and drone, plus some wheels so they can use it. The poor things don't have any landing gear of any kind.

Well, the shuttle transporter is exactly what it sounds like! And it's very well executed too. I think they did a much better job in midi-scale than I would have expected for mini scale or minifig scale. As usual for the past few years, much of the rest of the line is City-lite: a dune buggy for the kids who missed the City dune buggy last year, a Le Mans-inspired car for the kids who missed the Speed Champions Le Mans cars this year and two years before that.

Yup... Group A wants sets, group B thinks it's sacrilegious, group C wants sets but only if all profits are donated to humanitarian aid, group D wants sets but only if they get total control of design and distribution, and group E is too loosely organized to consult with.... In contrast, the profit motive of selling Star Wars toys and small models of secular landmarks like skyscrapers is pretty transparent and uncontroversial, and the point of contact for seeking license approval if appropriate is pretty clear.

Or rather something that vaguely resembled a mosque enough to get on the nerves of some people, when in fact it portrayed the country seat of a space slug.... In theory, that's fine, but it still represents a lot of risk. Look how much Star Wars fans clamor to have every possible detail of every film represented in a set, once Star Wars Legos became a thing. Now imagine every faith group in the Lego community clamoring for at least token and preferably disproportionate representation of their key sites and stories, and then bickering over whether or not it was even appropriate to depict them in Lego at all! Sometimes I think it would be nice to have sets depicting religious landmarks, but I recognize that it would be a very risky proposition from the perspective of corporate strategy even if the first wave sold very well.

Took all day to talk myself into it, but I pre-ordered the Tracer vs Widowmaker and Watchpoint Gibraltar sets with the Christmas Box. Figured that the PPP of that combination was about the same as if I'd waited for a 20% off Walmart sale, judging from the Walmart sales on overpriced Star Wars sets in the same price range.

The microfighter X-wings and Y-wings have only had a head, not a full droid. Probably a Naboo microfighter will also only have the head. It's still possible an astromech with back printing will show up in the Juniors X-wing or in one of those mysterious 20th anniversary sets, but I wouldn't count on it. The lack of back printing helps you get the "correct orientation" when putting the head on the body or when putting the droid in its slot (if not oriented sideways). Minifig torso assemblies don't have that front-back symmetry, and the back of minifig clothing usually looks pretty different than the front, so there's no confusion about which way the head faces (especially with double-sided heads). Since various set designers have made it clear that most set features have to pass justify themselves in play testing with kids rather than getting free rides as fan service, I think an astromech with back printing would get weeded out as either not worth the effort or actively confusing to kids, even though adult fans clamor for that extra detail. Of course, I can't recall offhand what R2-D2's back panel looks like, which probably means it's plain enough that it would be easily distinguished from the front panel. On the one hand, that invalidates my entire argument above: no confusion! On the other hand, it means that I never seriously minded the lack of back printing on R2-D2 as a kid (though it may have crossed my mind once or twice), and I don't mind it as an adult either.

[MOC] A prehistoric headhunter - posted Friday, October 16, 2018 1986: After successfully concluding his experimental space opera trilogy with Return of the Jedi, George Lucas feels like he has more stories to tell in the universe he has created - so many stories that he decides to launch a Saturday morning cartoon filmed in cutting-edge Supermarionation, with real miniatures and real explosions every week, and real clothing on real puppets! He's so excited to tell the heroic exploits of Anakin Skywalker before he turned to evil that he orders the first five episodes of his new series edited into a theatrical movie, but the writing and editing of his first foray into television is so bad that the movie flops at the box office. Nevertheless, Lego develops the spaceships in the movie and TV series into a sustainable source of revenue for several years, expanding its bestselling Star Wars line of toys with ships from the Clone Wars. By the turn of the century, though, Lego decides that the violence in Star Wars is incompatible with its corporate values, and the company abruptly drops the Star Wars line. The resources thus freed are invested in developing a line of space toys independent of any third-party entertainment property. Over the next two decades, financial needs occasionally force Lego to release a small wave of Star Wars kits to prop up its other lines, but adult fans of Lego continue to lament the loss of the Classic Star Wars line and the absence of a continuing Star Wars theme. That's the silly story - here's the real story: There's no time to lose with grad school applications, but I've been too nervous about the future to concentrate on those very applications. Having bought 75004 while browsing eBay in a state of depression (don't do that), I built this in Studio tonight to calm my nerves. Maybe I'll even build it someday, along with the Classic Space-style T-65 X-wing I built a few months ago. Maybe I'll work on my grad school applications tomorrow! Maybe, maybe, maybe.

The first version was pretty blocky and boring, but I like the second version. It looks like something you'd find in a mid-size city that wants to attract young educated professionals and families - just hip and fun enough for young families and good press, just conventional enough to be affordable for a city without a deep tax base. I really like the way the leaning book on the left breaks up the lines and lets light in through the window gap, and I like the rounded corner of the main entrance, though it could look a little smoother. However, it still looks pretty unfinished overall. I assume you're planning to build a back wall and a full interior? I think it would also look better if you put it on a green baseplate with trees and flowers, as if it was in the middle of some well-watered city's central park, or on a tan baseplate with desert plants, as if it was in a Southwestern city with xeriscaping ordinances. Those plain gray baseplates are pretty ugly on their own. Keep the updates coming, please! Actually, never mind about some of that. Looking back at the first post again, I actually think the first version works really well in a standard modular setting - a dense city center with buildings on both sides and narrow sidewalks. By breaking up the lines on both sides of the building, the second version takes up less space on the baseplates and emphasizes their dull gray color, which in turn makes me want to see the building in a park, with room to breathe on all sides. If you're going to put this in your modular layout, I'd say stick with the first version, even though the curved wall, book-styled roof, and leaning endcap are more technically interesting feats of Lego building.

In this context, "clone" means any part not manufactured by Lego itself.

That's an instantly recognizable model of an instantly recognizable building. The geometry of the block stacking must have been hard to work out; nice job with that. The surroundings look a little crude, but that's OK for the style of an Architecture set. As for the buildings themselves, they give me vertigo. They look fine now, but how will they look in fifty years? How does one escape from fire or earthquake in an apartment located in the central area of an overhanging block, especially one on the fourth rank? I'm sure the architects addressed such issues as best they could (and well enough to pass code), but egads, it looks like a disaster waiting to happen. Your model looks perfectly stable, though! Much less weight to support on the overhanging blocks. No warrens of staircases and elevators to get to your apartment. Just 3800 small Lego bricks stacked neatly. Much better.

Thanks for always being so patient with everyone who wants instructions to this magnificent model! (I don't know if I've said this before, but it really is the best large-scale X-wing I can remember seeing.) Sorry to hear your hard drive died - best of luck rebuilding or retrieving not only this model, but everything else you've lost.

Supported! Thanks for splitting these into their own project. I know the full-size version is very well scaled to a minifig, but based on my own Lego habits I'd prefer to have these. They would be much better for idly rolling about on a desk as I read a textbook or do homework, which is how I usually play with Lego. Still, this project would be even better if, like Microfighters, it came with the same minifigs as the full-size version. (I do hope the full-size version makes it all the way to 10K, though. It's not only a nice model that would work well as an official set, but the presentation is impeccable.)

I imagine that's what the $50 and $70 "hero" and "villain" ships from the April wave are. They seem about the right size for a racer from Resistance, the hero and villain ships from all the existing movies have been covered pretty well, and Lego has a history of issuing a pair of mid-sized ships for Star Wars properties that seem popular enough for sets but too risky for a large wave - see The Force Unleashed, The Old Republic, etc.

We've had three Y-wings on sale at the same time: microfighter, System, UCS. That's about the same as the Slave 1 situation we're looking at, since the mid-scale build comes in a UCS/MBS set instead of being sold by itself.

Select all the relevant parts and click the button "Group as Sub-Model" at the bottom right corner of the build window.

So would I. I might end up copying this for myself sometime, if you don't mind. It's a very nice, compact, simple build that really looks the part.