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That's a very nice little biplane there. I like the way you've achieved a more subtle dihedral than the original set, and the second seat and curved horizontal stabilizer profile are great. Also, the extended empennage is much better than the stumpy rear fuselage assemblies that official sets always have. However, It's a little disappointing to see that the ailerons and wheels no longer move, and the outboard struts look pretty flimsy.

This question is kind of off-topic, but there have been a lot of small digital mockups of various imagined parts of the Bugatti in this thread. Could someone point me to the best software for prototyping Technic models? Is there a package that can simulate mechanisms in motion? I've tried to build small mechanisms in LDD and Stud.io, but the part placement for anything but snapping bricks is very tedious and I can't figure out how to get a mechanism (say, a gear train) to move. Thanks! And back to the Bugatti - Has anyone been able to get a good look at the steering geometry? Does it have Ackermann steering this time, or just the same old parallel steering links used in most medium-sized Technic trucks?

^^^ OK, fair enough.

When someone takes a picture of a set in a Lego store, then Brickset is willing to post that picture. That's what they did with the 75181 UCS Y-wing, a couple days before its official reveal. This seems to be the same situation. Can someone link to the exact language in the Eurobricks forum guidelines that prohibits pictures like that? The clause against leaks doesn't say anything about sets that you see in the store with your own eyes and photograph with your own camera and buy with your own money. Are we now going to condemn Jangbricks for the times when he got sets before the official street date, perfectly legitimately, and side with TLG in demanding that his reviews of those sets be taken down, too? Let's be consistent, people. We like Brickset, we like Jangbricks, let's stop piling on the guy who got lucky enough to buy the Bugatti.

This is a very nice Enterprise. Off the top of my head, it's the best one I can remember seeing. The choice of a Millennium Falcon style petal fold for the saucer lets the warp engines be small enough to support with conventional construction techniques, while still looking good for display and sturdy for play. I've thought about buying the Mega Construx Enterprise, but each time I decided not to because its one-piece nacelle struts and other large parts for finish detail seem like such clumsy solutions. You show that a handsome display Enterprise doesn't need those cheats. Thanks for posting.

These are all impressive models, but the Airbus is my favorite. It's a very nice compromise between scale modelling and playability. The way you've integrated the windscreen and contoured the nose works perfectly for a minifigure set, but it still looks like the real aircraft. The model as a whole is very large, like one would expect for a scale model, but not too large to imagine playing with as an official set. How many pieces? However, the wings would look a lot better if you built them at an angle, because then the curved slopes on the leading edges could be continuous instead of stepped.

I'm a bit surprised to see bright colors and interior detail/functionality listed as "selling points" or "nostalgia points" for Classic Space relative to other Space subthemes and Star Wars. As a kid browsing through the Brickset database, I always thought that Classic Space had pretty drab, dull colors - all that gray! all that white! such unrelieved acres of blue! - and was pretty devoid of cool functions (though I admit I wasn't aware of most of the modular play features). It wasn't until M-Tron that Space really got colorful, and Star Wars sets certainly have (and have always had) quite as much accent color to relieve the gray as CS ever did. It wasn't really until the Blacktron Message Intercept Base that Space started to get cool features involving parts that move together as part of a mechanism, and that's after the Classic era. Likewise, even the earliest Star Wars sets had plenty of location builds and other accomodations of the idea that there's more to life than jumping in an X-wing and blowing stuff up, as General Organa would say - while, as Aanchir notes, many of the vehicle sets in Classic Space had little more than a cockpit and sometimes a cramped cargo space, and only the 1979 and 1980 moonbases were real buildings, as opposed to skeletal platforms. All that considered, I'd hazard a guess that the focus on jumping in an X-wing and blowing stuff up as opposed to going boldly where no one has gone before is what makes many Classic Space fans indifferent to Star Wars. But what do I know? It's not as if there's any really broad survey data for comparison. Besides, many Neo-Classic Space builders have decidedly militaristic interpretations of whatever faction operates the LL ships and their successors, and the official NCS ship (70816) acts as a "battleship" when it appears onscreen. So - heck, I don't even know what question I'm trying to answer. Maybe I better go to bed. For the record, I'd certainly love to see a new Space theme that includes detailed interior spaces in mobile bases and fixed bases. In the meantime, I'll just pretend that the upcoming Arctic Mobile Exploration Base is a great big Gerry Anderson-style behemoth land vehicle that's about to run off a cliff on a distant desert planet that mysteriously resembles a cheap 1960s soundstage, unless our hero the CMF Series 16 Astronaut can shut down the fusion reactor (sabotaged), engage the emergency brake (also sabotaged), or bail out the top hatch (jammed). He'll make it out, but you just know that rover won't appear in the next episode!

^ Please, let's be civil. You greatly exaggerate the frequency of Doctor Who wish posts from the OP, and the degree to which they "spam" the licensed thread. Not all of us have the time, space, funds, or skills to produce physical MOCs, but many of those who don't do a valuable community service by highlighting the excellent MOCs of others, and this is a good example. ^^^^^^^^^^^ Thanks for posting. This series looks great, and it would probably be a modest sales success if it was produced in the brick. TLG has certainly not hesitated to pick up much more questionable licenses before. That being said, it's an exaggeration to say that TLG would be "daft" not to capitalize on the novelty of Jodie Whittaker as the first woman Doctor by releasing a CMF series.

I'm not British at all, but my dad and uncle grew up watching Stingray, Thunderbirds, and Captain Scarlet when they first aired, so I grew up watching them on VHS and DVD and wanting Lego sets based on them. There have been a few good Thunderbirds projects on Ideas, but they haven't received enough support to be really viable. I think TLG missed its chance to do Gerry Anderson sets when it didn't pick up a license for the new series Thunderbirds Are Go (which is fantastic, by the way).

Gee...just one D2C ship that can compete with the 10210 Imperial Flagship and isn't a rotting ghost ship, that's all I need. Imperial Flagships now are priced as insanely as 10179 Millennium Falcons circa 2016.

He meant "deployable." Which means "retractable."

Where did Tintin and Haddock go that Johnny Thunder did not? In no particular order: 1. Various Muslim-majority countries on the Mediterranean coast. JT won't go there...too political. 2. The Moon. That's obviously not JT's thing, but we can hope City goes there someday. 3. Treasure hunting in the South Pacific. JT and co. could do that, but Town, City, and Aqua Raiders have pretty much picked all the wrecks clean by now. 4. Old castles in Britain and assorted fictional small European countries. That's too close to home for JT and co. 5. The Andes. A long-lost Andean civilization would be right up JT's alley, and reasonably distinct from the jungle ruins close to City. If JT ever comes back, he should tackle nos. 3 and 5.

Excellent work. Thanks for posting these pictures. It's amazing how much you've managed to simplify and improve the External Tank. I'm not sure how I feel about the revised wing, though. On the one hand, it uses modern parts and avoids the awkward gap in the original version. On the other hand, it's very...busy, and the parts needed aren't all available in dark bluish gray. Of course, it would really help if TLG introduced some nice new chainable 45-degree wedge plates with the same design as other wedge plates, like those used for the elevons. I wonder if the original version's reliance on old-style wedge plates is one of the reasons why it didn't make it through the review.

It's clear from the pictures on FBTB that the X-wing engines are built using this part.

I think that canopy appears in the Flying Fox set from Justice League (link).

It looks like the X-wing uses a different mechanism to open the wings than past models. The jacks between the wings are the same, but they're actuated by some sort of sliding mechanism instead of a simple knob. It'll be interesting to build that and see how it works.

That connection has been used in a few official sets before. (I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.) I was really surprised when I first saw it. Thanks for posting, though.

Yeah, I get this and I agree. Traditional Castle does a pretty good job of offering inspiration without too much definition, and I totally understand (and agree with) the general points against licensed themes and for more generic in-house themes. I suppose my comment was really kind of off-topic, as it was more related to the general tension between "unconstrained creativity" and genre building than it was to the past few years' lack of a traditional Castle theme and the potential impact of Harry Potter sets on future possibilities for such a theme.

This. Although licenses considerably reduce the "solution space" available for play, that very constraint serves as a useful point of departure for play, so long as the sets themselves remain reasonably flexible. That's why so many adult builders, proud of their creativity and imagination, nevertheless build largely within genres that are very well defined: Neo-Classic Space builds, Ice Planet builds, Star Wars, various genres of Castle, Bionicle, big rectangular SHIPs that all look the same, etc. Heck, that's the reason why TLG began producing themed "sets" back in the 1950s rather than completely unconstrained but thoroughly generic boxes of basic bricks! It's the same principle used in design thinking and decision making of all kinds: the more rapidly you can narrow the design space, the more quickly you can apply all your imagination to solving the more narrowly defined problem - even if that leads to some engineering solutions that are not ideal, or it leads to the Dark Knight of Gotham riding a thestral at a joust at Hogwarts because there isn't a "real" black knight figure available to joust at a "real" castle.

Sounds like you've had a long life so far doing lots of useful things. Writing software for Wells Fargo must be very different from tending a nuclear reactor. Sometimes I wish I'd gone into ROTC in undergrad, but now I think I'm too old to start on the path to cool stuff like that. So I just build Lego in my free time instead. Like you, I like to try to build as if it were an official set, but I don't know enough about mechanisms to do Technic MOCs so I just build silly Space stuff on the computer. Maybe one day I'll even be satisfied enough with something to try it in real plastic - hopefully that doesn't take 25 years!

That's a fun little build. My favorite part is the astromech. What does the pilot of this little space truck do with the stick of cockpit glass in her hand?

Since the Red Arrows version of the BAE Hawk was not chosen for production, I doubt the Tucano and the SR-71 will make it. TLG seems to be OK with making aircraft that resemble modern military aircraft as long as they are too generic to be definitively tied to a single real-life aircraft and they are in bright airshow colors. The Red Arrows Hawk might have been interpreted as a corporate endorsement of British military engagements, and the Tucano might be interpreted as a corporate endorsement of Brazilian military engagements. The SR-71, brilliant bird though it is and submitted in NASA colors, also has some real-life combat history in Vietnam and elsewhere, so I can see Ideas steering clear of it. Personally, I expect the Amelia Earhart set and the Flintstones set to be produced.

The air pressure inside the base is kept equal to the water pressure outside, so the water doesn't get in. It's the same principle used in diving bells. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_pool

That Enterprise-E looks like a nice build. Do you mind posting more pictures?

Editing the first post to archive old content is becoming quite a bother, so I changed the topic title to something generic and I'll go back to posting new content in new replies. Over the past few days I've been refining my Galaxy Explorer remake some more. Every Classic Space fan has to try out a modern interpretation of the Galaxy Explorer, right? I made the following changes compared to the previous version in this thread: Structure is entirely rebuilt Deleted upturned wingtips Added stud shooters Refined roof, ramp, rear hatches, cockpit, rear wing and struts Replaced airlock compartment with extended garage and more cargo space Base is now inspired by 926 Command Base instead of the little box in 928 The goal is to bring the base and ship in at about 900-1100 parts, for an "RRP" of $120, which is about what the inflation-adjusted RRP of the original 928 was, while using only modern parts (within Stud.io availability, to be amended in a Bricklink order) and keeping the ship as close to the size and shape of the original as possible. Currently the build uses about 750 parts. I'm not sure how to make the base walls visually interesting instead of boring blue slabs without ruining the clean, simple look of the 1978-1979 Space wave. (I'm deliberately avoiding the heavily greebled look of most Neo-Classic Space builds.) Please, reply with any comments or criticism you may have. I'll do my best to incorporate any suggestions you may have into the build, as long as they make sense to me and seem to fit. Ship Hatches open Underneath Base Walls open