Mylenium

Extremely unlikely. 3D printing has pretty much peaked already. Unless there is a new revolutionary technology on the horizon that will simplify this on every level, printing your bricks will never be an option except for a few specialized parts. There would not even be an advantage for the regular use - you'd need different filaments or resins for every color and it would have to meet certain quality standards, the printing costs time and energy, you have to put up with cleaning procedures and removing support structures and so on. On top of it you might need a printer and materials for stickers or printing on elements directly. It would just not be competitive and any factory-produced set would be considerably cheaper. And "custom designs" are already possible today, but don't count as genuine LEGO. At least that part is never going to change. In order to control their designs and trademarks, LEGO will always want to have their own manufacturing. Mylenium Unlikely. In a big industrial standardized production system like LEGO's there would simply be no room for that and as much as some things might be desirable, it would complicate the manufacturing process exponentially. And then there's of course that thing with quality standards and durability. LEGO has enough problems with that as it is and they're not going to make their life more complicated than necessary. They will introduce new materials and so on, but they'll be careful and never go all out on it. It's e.g. already very predictable that their current pearlescent coatings will be troublesome down the road when they age and degrade and as a company of a certain type you will be very considerate about when to use such stuff. Again, unlikely. The pigmentation of the bricks would have to be so low, you couldn't distinguisch their shades in plain daylight. They'd all basically look just transparent white with the colors only showing up once you stack them. That's one of those things I know from doing 3D graphics of glassy stuff. Even minor colorations (under 3 percent) can massively accumulate and then your objects become a solid colored blob eventually. And of course you'd have to find a material that minimizes the reflections and refractions that much. That would likely then have to be some special plastic with nano-prisms and it would be so expensive to produce, it wouldn't be worth it. Mylenium

It's not a real simulation. It just traces along the elements and checks for a minimum number of connections. It's pretty much useless for seriously evaluating the overall stability of your model, so whatever warnings you get are probably utterly irrelevant to begin with. Mylenium

Not really good. The slope would need to be locked in at the top, anyway. At one stuf wide only this is never ever going to have any devent stability to begin with. Whatever you have in mind will require a radically different approach, but since you haven't actually explained what you are trying to achieve, it's impossible to advise. Mylenium

Definitely. That's one of my pet peeves with Friends sets or other stuff that uses those awful tall bricks and large panels. If they'd use conventional 1 x 2 bricks and so on you could do much more with them and weren't so locked into the pre-determined designs. Mylenium

I'm not sure if this would ever happen. True, they have the manufacturing skills and capacity, but I also see several conflicts of interest, as they are e.g. also one of the Star Wars licensees for scale models and collectible figures. Outside that I'm pretty sure they are watching the market closely, but it's probably fair to say that neither of us knows enough about the Asian markets and regional competitors like Oxford or the various Chinese manufacturers to even come close to an assessment how viable it would be for them to compete in this field. I would imagine that if they ever decided to get into brick-based stuff, that's how they'd start, too, before expanding from Asia across the globe. Mylenium

One more critical aspect: pre-determined breaking points/ expansion joints to reduce stress forces/ break force propagation. It's an oft forgotten engineering principle and reminds me about that "built like a tank" post in one of the other recent threads. You don't need to turn models into solid blocks to make them durable. It's also one of the reasons why I'm not too fond of some longer elements as they can mess up an even force distribution when not used carefully. Mylenium

Yeah, sure, but the world was different in 2006. And honestly: Given what crooked stuff LEGO do on some models, regardless, this strikes me as a merely academic exercise. LEGO's adherence to those self-imposed rules has always been fishy at best. In any case, long before plugging a pin into a 1 x 1 brick, I guess I'd have other bones to pick and this seems far too trivial to even make a fuss about. Mylenium

Not sure what you're getting at. Pins have stud diameter and element 4274 has no friction ridges and I believe it's tolerance is somewhere around 0.1 mm, anyway, given how loosely those elements fit generally. It will only squeeze where it's supposed to - at the rim at the top. It's not an elegant technique, but in terms of stress limits perfectly acceptable. Definitely an odd one, but those clips have had several revisions in recent years, so maybe it's indeed a matter of more liberal tolerances. For long-term presentation of the model I'd replace it most likely with something involving bracket 36840 and a sideways clip, though. The way it's done in the set is certainly not trustworthy and the clip's arms will break eventually at some point. Mylenium

On most "regular" Technic models those elements would often be bolstered by other elements left and right or "locked" in to minimize their movement, so yes, in my view it's probably a case of where the designs don't hold up to the way they are being used. At least the few Bionicle models I bought as used sets to scalp them for parts always had me going "SRSLY?" as they disobeyed some fundamental engineering principles (and by extension quite likely LEGO's own internal design rules). It only seems logical to me that they wouldn't withstand extensive handling for long or being post in unfavorable positions where the forces add up and certainly this wouldn't get better as the plastic ages and gets more brittle... Mylenium

Probably a combination of circumstances. If you're really into Bionicle, then many of the connections are not sound from an engineering standpoint to begin with. Too man single-point connections exposed to extreme forces. This could then simply be further be exacerbated by the models being "imbalanced" due to tiny variations with those axle connections causing further tension in the models. You know, most of your models are likely not really perfectly symmetrical and bend to one side or another. It's simply inherent in how LEGO pieces work and the tolerances they have. And finally, yes, of course there are recognizable design issues/ flaws in many of the elements you mentioned, as they intentionally are built to have a default negative tension that clamps the axles in place which then again is affected by the pieces manufacturing tolerances or even the color. So to get to a point: You could go through your models and check these things, substitute parts and so on, but overall you won't be able to mitigate this fully and will have to put in lifelong maintenance, occasionally even rebuilding the models every few years with swapped pieces. It's just plastic, after all. Mylenium

Happens a lot lately. I always used to thing that I was living on a happy island here in Germany as those issues seemed to be rare, but this year had several mangled or poorly sealed boxes as well. This one was the worst yet: https://myleniumsbrickcorner.wordpress.com/2020/11/25/best-of-the-year-lego-creator-3in1-pirate-ship-31109/ Mylenium

Well, you could go back to the primordial soup of the original "Mechwarrior" games where this trope basically originated back in the 1980s and conclude that it was just as wrong back then. I'm afraid this is one of those cases where there is no simple black & white answer here. If you wanted to be overly academic about it, you would in fact not even use words like "mech" or "drone" which are frowned upon in the respective communities that develop (semi-) autonomous vehicles and devices... I do get your point, but it's ultimately a waste of time to even think about it, even more so as the translations for set names and descriptions to other languages are sometimes even more ridiculous. I'm sure I could reverse-translate some German set descriptions and you'd LMAO about the nonsensical gobbledygook it would result in. Mylenium

It could simply be autonomously controlled by an AI or be remote-controlled. Not much of a stretch to imagine, given that one way or another no human could control such a thing without massive assistance from sensors and computers, anyway. Mylenium

Pretty much nailed it. I'm not quite sure what to make of this new breed of SW sets. Sure, the more compact builds are nice for kids and make the models more swooshable, but at the same time the appeal of something more realistic is lost. By extension I'm also dreading that getting a "realistic" model now might end up meaning that you have to buy super expensive stuff at the UCS level. You know, that reaction-counter-reaction thing. Mylenium

Paper is easily recyclable and has been for years, printing inks have long moved to being non-toxic and even many auxiliary products involved in physical printing such as alcohol and other solvents are used in such low quantities these days, its impact on the whole environmental footprint for a company that produces plastic products can be debated. Sure, every little bit helps, but it's not that this particular thing would tilt the overall balance that much. And if you really were serious about it, you'd have to dig much deeper and discuss how much water making paper consumes. At the same time of course it's not that the Internet is running on thin air. Data centers and networks consume power, too, so the "praise the digital" chorus cannot be sung entirely uncritically. Also, on a side note, just look at how things have developed with e-books - everybody went crazy about abandoning printed paper books, yet here we are three years later and there's still a whole lot of books being printed physically... Mylenium

Yupp, at least that's true. Not sure if I share this view, given how many times I felt dumb for possibly having done something wrong only to realize that there are actual errors in many instructions. But that's a whole different discussion, of course... Yupp, exactly the point. Mylenium

Someone holding a consumer/ prosumer/ semi-pro camera in a white room is as good as it gets these days for most mundane tasks like corporate video, product presentations, wedding videos etc.. What do you expect "professionals" doing anything different, when you get 4k video on a 800 dollar camera? Nobody would use an expensive RED camera or whatever to shoot a LEGO build unless there is a genuine technical requirement, even less so for 300+ videos every half year. And I already mentioned that thing with voice-overs/ narration in different languages. It would be a major production, cost a lot of money and not be worth the effort. Similarly, you can't do it all CG. Who would pay for that? Do you have any idea how much effort has to go into that once you move beyond automated functions such as the ones found in Stud.io's renderer?! Sorry, but it's one thing if enthusiasts do that on their own time and dime, a completely different story if you need to pay people and equipment for doing it. That's one of the other truths here: If you did the math, even a successful YouTuber like Jang can only do this with self-exploitation because under the hood the economics are terrible. Imagine how poorly some little-viewed video on a Friends set would do on YouTube and then apply that to how LEGO would need to produce these videos. It just doesn't make sense to invest, say 10000 Euro, for something that nobody watches and they'd have to do it many times over every year. And let's face it: This stuff is tedious as hell. I've done 3D animation and other graphics for explainer videos and corporate stuff for over 20 years and I don't envy anyone having to put up with this on a day to day basis. It's extremely repetitive and dull a lot of the time. Mylenium

Not really. Here's a few thoughts: LEGO sets don't max out a container's payloads or max volume, anyway. Nothing gained here. Same for unbundling individual cartons from a larger shipment and sort them e.g. into those trolleys sent out to individual store. Cartons need to have specific sizes to be stackable and easily storable in logistics centers. Annoying as it may be, LEGO boxes are oversized to minimize parts damage. Carrying around an extra carton with instructions just in case someone wants them along the logistics chain would be more trouble than its worth - too many people have to touch it to put in pre-counted booklets matching the rest of the stock, other people need to take out those instructions, this stuff needs to be stored somewhere. You see, in logistics it's all about streamlining these processes and introducing a new way of doing things is a disturbance in the force that may cause much more complication than further optimizing things. And seriously, this little thing with the instructions does nothing to make LEGO "greener". It might safe a few trees and safe them two or three million a year on materials if they nixed all printed instructions, but compared to the rest of their materials intake this is marginal and laughable. Mylenium

I don't think so. The whole point of this having become its own sub-genre is because everyone has a different preference - some prefer silent videos all together, others with music, some like it when the builder motor-mouths all over the video. If you produce a reasonably "neutral" official video, all that individual distinction is lost and if you wanted a narration, you also run into issues with different languages having different timings and so on. Could be a lot of work that doesn't really pay off. Would only complicate the logistics and that's why I'm 100% certain it won't happen. That will always be a rather absolute "either...or..." - either LEGO puts the instructions in or simply leaves them out. Mylenium Yupp, exactly. Mylenium

Yeah, sure, but that only reaffirms how inflexible they are, simply because they are such control freaks and want to handle every aspect of the distribution pipeline... Mylenium

I'm sure if it comes back to me I'll post the link to the instructions and the pages, but for now it's all a jumble Oh please... In a day and age where half the Internet is full with fake images? If this nonsensical statement ever had any truth to it, we are long past that point. Mylenium

I didn't mean to imply that it's per se bad. However, there are parts of the instructions that are at times ridiculous regardless of considerations on skills. I can't remember which it was, but I recently built a set where they showed how to plug-on flower-shaped studs across multiple pages one-by-one and it made me go "WTF?". You know, none of the elements were obscured/ hidden, the colors were clearly discernible and it all would have wonderfully fitted on one page/ into one step with everyone being able to follow. It's those little things that indeed makes it appear LEGO are "oversimplifying"... Mylenium

Good: 42069 - sturdy build, amazing details, just an awful color Bad: Pretty much anything current to do with "cranes" - 42070, 42082, 42108. You know, those flimsy supports, bending outriggers and flip-flopping turntables. 42070 has a surprisingly sturdy chassis frame, though. Mylenium

There are enough studies that e.g. prove that today's kids have less spatial acuity and dexterity due to spending less time with traditional crafting hobbies and doing less sports. One needn't even think of ADHD and all that. It's also just as weird that a lot of kids can't even verbally describe colors. Not to sound like my mom, who is a retired special education teacher, but it probably does play a part... Mylenium

Well, you could buy a book on basic mechanical engineering. Really not much more than that to it. You know, basic engineering principles: Triangles are more stable than squares, single strut connections never work because they are prone to shear, box frames are more stable then single layer frames, you always need a t least three point connections to prevent unwanted rotations and so on, and so on. Not really. Some models are pretty terrible from an engineering POV. The point is not to "build stuff like tanks", anyway. You need to build your stuff to spec. Doesn't do you any good when a super-rigid frame on a car mangles your gears or way too many stud connections on a model cause so much internal tension, you get microfractures in the plastic. Overdoing things can just be as detrimental to your models as making them to flimsy. The trick is to find the right balance. Mylenium