icm

Sorry if someone's asked this question before, but I couldn't find the answer after a few simple searches of the site: Is it possible to save a post as a draft and finish it later?

A lot of early sci-fi/action themes seem to have acted as rehearsals or practice runs for later licensed themes: "Look at Johnny Thunder! You can trust us with Indiana Jones!" A very successful sci-fi rescue theme could then be a rehearsal for a Thunderbirds theme, if that franchise had suitable longevity and wide appeal - but I'm not counting on it.

I think Sea-Tron was a prototype theme that developed into what was eventually released as Aquazone.

Well, the "disjointed" Creator sets are usually larger brick-built models; they go together in that sense. The Creator sets with minifigs are essentially a subtheme of City. A disjointed anthology-style Fables theme (as others on this forum have called the idea) wouldn't have the economies of figure production that Creator minifig sets do unless there were, separately, Castle and Space themes in production or its minifigs crossed over frequently with simultaneous CMF lines. The line could probably be made to work both in production and in sales, but it's probably not as simple as "Creator but with Castle and Space sets too."

OK, that makes sense. I would like to see a theme like that. The way you describe it reminds me of the Juniors line, but applied to a higher age range.

OK, I think I see what you mean. But how would that be any different than a bunch of single-wave castle/fantasy/action themes? It sounds like you want to (for example) release Galaxy Squad one year, Castle 2013 the next, and so on, but all branded under the same theme name.

Sounds like...(drumroll)... Ninjago!

"Gorgon" reminds me of the tentacled monster in what is presumably the Kessel Run in the trailer, but I doubt the code name would be so obvious as to make 75219 a Kessel Run Monster.

I sure hope they don't reject it as "just another big NASA project." I'm still disappointed that they didn't approve the Space Shuttle by KingsKnight. Even though the model represents a specific aircraft owned by NASA, it's still a modern military aircraft so I expect that, just as they rejected the Red Arrows BAE Hawk despite its non-combat context, they will also reject this project despite its non-combat context.

The difference between Bricklink and Lepin is that parts sold on Bricklink are genuine Lego. The Lego Group (TLG) got paid for their design work and manufacturing expenses when the parts were first purchased. Lepin steals that intellectual property. It uses the design effort of TLG without paying for it. Although TLG may not produce a certain part or set anymore, it still holds the copyright, and that should be respected. Here's an analogy: Say there's a movie you want to have in your home library, but the studio no longer sells it on DVD. (Assume for the sake of argument that you don't download or stream movies). You should get a used legitimate copy on eBay rather than getting a new bootleg copy or downloading it via Bit Torrent. Lego sets are creative works, and the rights of the creator should be respected.

I see no harm in allowing bootleggers to make similar themes, but any bootlegger who made and sold unlicensed copies of unreleased Lego sets would clearly be committing theft of intellectual property. If you reverse-engineer an unreleased set from publicly available photos and release free instructions for it, that's different.

Sorry if someone else has mentioned this earlier in the thread, but it seems like Nexo Knights really had the deck stacked against it in terms of timing. During its brief two and a half years on shelves (counting the 1H18 wave), there will have been two (!) in-house Lego movies about different themes, three (!) Star Wars movies, six or seven (!) Marvel movies, and four (!) DC movies in theaters, each with at least one Lego set and in several cases with large waves. Ninjago didn't slow down to make room for it, instead releasing several large waves besides the movie line, and at my local TRU there was still a lot of leftover Chima on the shelves. How could Nexo Knights possibly compete will all that product in the same sci-fi/action category? Perhaps if the same concept was executed essentially the same way two years earlier or two years later it would have exceeded expectations, but there just wasn't room for it in 2016-18.

Thank you for clarifying your intent, and sorry for cluttering up the thread with a PM request. I'm not sure which USA-based copy of 8480 on Bricklink is yours, but they're all well out of my budget. Best of luck selling things off.

In the debate over the relative merits of external IPs versus internal IPs in theme development, and the parallel debate over the relative merits of themes with named characters and a story in which TLG has invested significant effort versus those without, most of the arguments for or against the versatility of minifigures and sets in imaginative play (or the lack thereof) seem to be based on general principles as viewed from an adult perspective. We argue about these things without taking the time to describe how we actually played with our minifigures and sets as children. Younger forum members like me were children when TLG first began to license on a large scale (that is, to seek licenses for new themes as opposed to releasing a promotional Shell or Maersk set every now and then), so these memories might be relevant to the current thread. I will link to Brickset with examples to illustrate how I applied minifigures and characters within and without their original “intended” context. My brother and I arranged our sets in opposite corners of our shared room and treated those arrangements like towns (we called them "groups") with designated mayors, doctors, and prominent citizens drawn from our favorite sets or from the loose parts bin; some characters lived outside the groups as recurring bad guys. First, I almost never played with the minifigures from in-house sci-fi/action themes. The Aquasharks (link), Aquanauts (link), Exploriens (link), UFO aliens (link), and Rock Raiders (link) had no characters or roles sufficiently well-defined for me to play with them in their “original context” (as far as I knew), so I paid no attention to their names in the mail-order catalog. (I believe the UFO and Rock Raiders lines had names and story.) When I mixed and matched the parts of these minifigures in imaginative play, their torsos never fit well in my town-like group, so I was always dissatisfied with the resulting characters until I could redefine those characters with minifigure parts from other Town sets. I think if I was in the target audience today, the more defined characters and roles of comparable modern themes like Ninjago and Nexo Knights would help me integrate the minifigures into my town-like group when I got a new set. However, the parts from the in-house sci-fi/action sets (link, link, link, link, link) went into my most enduring early MOCs, which I still have today. Perhaps with the more defined characters and roles in modern big-bang sci-fi/action themes I would not scatter the parts of their polybag-class sets and use them in my own builds, since I wouldn’t have to invent a name and a story to go with the kit on my own. Note, however, that I never asked for those sci-fi/action kits, so I never had anything in mind before I got them. Second, I had no trouble using Town, Castle, and Pirates minifigures in my town-like context without pre-defined names and outside their pre-defined roles. This pirate (link) was a grumpy old troublemaker with a crude rowboat until I finally built a pirate ship for him out of basic bricks when I got a pirate captain in this set (link). The classic blue-suited Octan race car driver (link) became, with a different head, my town’s doctor; his opposite number’s torso (link) piloted a little starfighter MOC. One fellow from the Dark Forest subtheme of Castle (link) became my town’s mayor after a convoluted story in which he dissolved into a pile of tomato salsa and was somehow reconstituted; his fellow bandit’s torso (link) got an Exploriens head and became a bandit who harassed the groups from a zippy little speeder. The torso from a Coast Guard minifigure (link) became the base of the doctor in my brother’s town, and a Town pilot (link, link) was good for anything. All their corresponding sets were swiftly parted out. However, Town people packs (link) never did anything for me because there were too many new figures without names or context, and I didn’t have adequate parts to build contexts for the minifigures without them (fire engines and a firehouse for the firefighter, a restaurant for the chef, a bank to go with the banker). The banker torso eventually made its way into a headless bandit who drove the first Harry Potter car (link). I think as a little kid getting the same relative size of sets today (polybag-class or just larger), I would play much the same way with today’s Town, generic Castle, and generic Pirates. Third, sets and minifigures related to things I was really interested in stayed together: Space Port support vehicles (link), Adventurers cars and airplanes (link, link), Star Wars vehicles. If the minifigures had a pre-defined name and role that I was aware of, they generally kept their name, but usually not their character (I’m bad at getting inside somebody’s head). For example, this Imperial officer (link) became a bureaucrat from some distant government agency who repeatedly drove a little car up to the town gates with a load of onerous regulations to try to impose on the town, and the stormtroopers I got at the same time were his bodyguards. My interpretation of Yoda (link) trended toward the batty old hermit frog: he was always trying to get people around town to try his latest stew, not battling droids and Emperors. My rebel mechanic (link) got a custom tool cart, flying tow truck, and makeshift Y-wing; my Anakin Skywalker minifigure from Episode I (link) was never treated as a child or as any relation to Darth Vader, who (link) was never very menacing. As previously described, my Harry Potter car ended up in the hands of a headless bandit with a penchant for potatoes. Even the TLG original characters with a story that I followed closely ended up with very different characters than they had in the story, because they had to conform to the town-like context: Pohatu became a friendly giant who taught people how to run fast, and the brave leader Tahu became a dim-witted coward who was never any help in a crisis. But sometimes even sets I really liked came apart: this space shuttle (link) got miniaturized into a starfighter because it was too big and bulky to swoosh on its own, and the loose astronaut minifigure I got from my friend was a very poor fit behind the windscreen of the stock set. So even sets corresponding to a very specific IP, owned by a child who likes that IP a lot and knows all about the story and its most trivial details, don’t force that child to re-enact scenes from the story. Sometimes such sets and minifigures can be points of departure for imaginative play and sometimes they can be stifling, but that’s true for the most “original” in-house themes and the most “classic” in-house themes as well. I could relate well enough to Yoda to play with him as a batty old hermit, but I found the Harry-Ron-Hermione trio (link) stifling because I couldn’t make my H-R-H interact like the book H-R-H. Tahu’s character was sufficiently well-defined and larger-than-life in the source story that I could be happy with that as a point of departure for my own buffoonish take on it, but Onua’s character was stifling because it was boring at the source. Unnamed TLG original minifigures and characters could take on any role I wanted in the town-like group, but only if I really wanted that role and I liked the figure to begin with. I can summarize my childhood attitude toward this thread’s debate as follows: The specificity or lack thereof of an in-house or licensed theme, its named characters, and the sets of which it is composed, is not what determines how well it will encourage imaginative play for any individual child. What matters is how well any individual set or character matches with that child’s interests and personality traits. As other people in this thread have posted, modern licensed themes and big-bang themes with stories and named characters still have a tremendous amount of variety to engage children with a very broad range of interests and personality traits. Presumably these are reasonably well matched to the range of interests and personality traits of children today, thanks to market research by TLG. They may leave out kids who just want a simple generic spaceship (like Classic Space), a simple generic castle (like Classic Castle), a simple generic pirate ship (like Classic Pirates), and even kids who get books of TLG propaganda (link) for Christmas and grow up wanting the 928 Galaxy Explorer and 375 Castle because of pictures in that book and end up as AFOLs (like yours truly), but there is not enough finely-targeted production capacity in the world to satisfy every interest. And how do kids react to today’s themes, today? My only nephew who is into Lego went through a phase where he built big walls out of basic bricks in a futile attempt to close off a cave in the play room. Now all he wants are sets with as many minifigure weapons as possible. Every set and every figure he receives (including the most detailed Star Wars figures) disappear into a big bin and reappear as mis-matched hodgepodges of parts in which I can discern no imagination, in the sense of a clear goal before, during, or after the build process. What they have in common is that the figures and vehicles are bristling with weapons or features that I am told are weapons, and that they are drastically overpowered gangs which always beat whatever I send against them, no matter what. I’d say that pretty well matches the kind of imaginative play that Lego may be encouraging with big-bang themes like Ninjago, Chima, and Nexo Knights. I wish it was more peaceful, like how my brother and I played with our Lego, but if you transplanted my nephew to the 1980s or 1990s and gave him Castle or Space sets from those decades, I'm sure his play would be just as violent. How many times has someone said on Reddit or on this forum that they used the various protruding and/or transparent parts on old Space sets as ray guns? TL;DR: Stop whining about big-bang themes and licenses and mourning Classic themes. Kids will be kids. Personal experience.

You'll notice I did not make an offer; I asked for a price. It is not your business to speculate on whether or not I am willing to pay whatever price Blakbird may quote in a private message, should he choose to reply. Please do not assume the worst about forum members who post infrequently. Thank you for your consideration. Now let's get this thread back on track: Blakbird is selling most of his collection, and is soliciting interest.

Can you PM me a price for 8480? Thanks. Incidentally, what software package is best for modeling functional Technic mechanisms, as opposed to putting parts together in a single static shape?

As a kid, I never wanted the parts in the X-wing set for the sake of building something else - I wanted the X-wing, because the makeshift X-wings I built from loose parts were never any good. I'm still that way, decades later.

I think the Arrowhead from the Freemaker Adventures is a pretty good match for Neo-Classic Space - I might even place it in the top three Lego Spaceships of the 21st century, beside Benny's Spaceship and the Space Police III Galactic Enforcer. Its accent colors are not blue and yellow, but it has the same basic configuration as the large Classic spaceships of yore: a big light gray wedge with a sharply swept front section, less sharply swept mid-rear section, and sharply reverse-swept aft section a large cabin with tandem seating, faired directly into the wedge base underneath a wedge-shaped canopy an assortment of details that may be weapons or sensors, as you please a big cargo bay near the rear of the ship (though here it holds crystals rather than a rover) a big engine cluster at the back a TLG original design and concept, despite the licensed branding Also, the Bat-Space Shuttle is a pretty good match for a classic (though not Classic) Lego spaceship. Despite taking its general shape from the real-world Space Shuttle, it has many of the same features as the largest ships in Space lines of the past: sleek sci-fi styling with lots of weapon and sensor details several detachable modules storage for a rover a base a TLG original design and concept, despite the licensed branding I'm not planning to buy either of these sets, but I think they show the situation for more or less original Space sets isn't as dire as some people on some forums say. TLG is pretty good at finding ways to include Spaceships where you least expect them, even without having a TLG-original "Space" line in production.

That's a fine interpretation of an old-school XJ, which (if I remember right from the schlocky Star Wars novels I read in middle school) had two big engines embedded in the fuselage, instead of mounted on the wings.

I would consider a "classic" theme to be the first one to successfully explore a certain thematic territory. Adventurers is the classic in the exploration category, because it came first; then followed Pharoah's Quest, Town Arctic, and all the City exploration themes. Likewise, the Dino Island Adventurers subtheme is the classic dinosaur theme, because it came before Dino Attack/2010, Dino (2012), or Jurassic World. Bionicle 2001-2003 is the classic CCBS theme, even though Throwbots and Slizers came first, because it was the first successful action figure theme (yes, I know CCBS as such wasn't developed until later). Similarly, all the in-house spy themes (and arguably the Super Heroes themes) have roots in Alpha Team 2001, so it's a classic in my book. Note that this is classic with a lowercase "c"; I don't object to reserving Classic with a capital "C" for the 1970s-1980s themes released when minifigures were a new invention and before subthemes had individual names. By that definition, I would consider the "Classic Era" to have ended in 1989 when the first non-standard smiley minifigure faces were released with Pirates. But it doesn't really matter.

Looking at 75156 Krennic's Imperial Shuttle on Brickset led me to the Bricklist "Sets designed by Hans Burkhard Schlomer." In the entry for 75182 Republic Fighter Tank, he writes this: "Clones need a ride too! I did this set as a quick side-project while working on a much, much, much, much, much, much larger set which is going to be announced on September 1st 2017." Since this fellow designed the UCS Slave 1 and was involved with Assault on Hoth, this might be a tease for the long-rumored new UCS Millennium Falcon. Or it could be a Technic supercar or a Creator Expert building like Big Ben, I guess. <Shrug.> We'll see.

Yes, LegoMonorailFan, I am aware of that. The first paragraph of my post was intended to show my awareness of that fact. The moderator action in locking the minifig voting thread at the same time as VF2187 was banned, together with the moderator's language in locking that thread, confused the issue to casual observers. Hence the desire for a minimal indicator on the profiles of banned members for the reason for the ban: in this case, it might read "confidential images" rather than "disruptive threads," or perhaps give a brief numerical citation of the clause in the site guidelines upon which the ban is based.

After reading the last two pages of this thread, I see that there was a very good reason for banning VF2187. However, in the Star Wars forum it appeared like the ban was due to moderator impatience with the minifig voting games. I have been following the forum for ten years, and those games seemed to me to be conducted in a remarkably respectful fashion, with special care to avoid disrupting the first page of the forum and without a pattern of disrespectful posts. I can find nothing against those games in the site guidelines, so I wonder if it was appropriate to lock them along with banning VF2187. Because of cases like this, in which a member who is seemingly in good standing is suddenly banned, I would like to respectfully suggest that it is appropriate to provide a minimal description of why banned members were banned. Perhaps it could be a small notice on the member profile. Without such transparency, the situation is comparable (perhaps hyperbolically) to a knock on the door in the night, in which a man suddenly disappears and the neighbors have no idea why. The low incidence of complaints in the broader Eurobricks community could be partially attributed to a fear that speaking out might incur a ban. That is why I only recently created a user account, despite reading the forum for ten years: fear of accidentally incurring the displeasure of a moderator and suffering a ban.

[MOC] A prehistoric headhunter - posted Friday, November 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. Archived content in quote below: [MOC] An excess X-wing - posted Thursday, October 4, 2018 Archived content in quote below: [MOC] Naboo Courier - posted Friday, September 7, 2018 Archived content in quote below: [MOC/WIP] TIE/ln, ca. 1983 - posted September 2, 2018 Archived content in quote below: [MOC/WIP] T-65, ca. 1983 - posted August 1, 2018 Archived content in quote below: [MOD] T-70, ca. 1999 - posted June 19, 2017

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? Archived content below from April 7, 2018, about a spaceship built from spare parts. [ARCHIVED CONTENT IN QUOTES BELOW] The quote below contains content posted on June 19, 2017 about a space skiff and a 928 redux. The quote below contains content posted on February 13, 2018 about a concept for another Galaxy Explorer homage. The quote below contains a February 21, 2018 concept for the landing pad for the Galaxy Explorer redux described in the previous quote. The quote below contains a February 22, 2018 concept for the same landing pad. The quote below contains content posted on 18 March 2018 about a Mega Bloks space base.