DanNeely

as a side note, I did try screwing around with groups/subgroups on the crane itself. I wasn't able to figure out how to set things up so that repeated elements generated as make 6 of this (eg red crane segments) then install them all at once, instead of make 1, install it, make a second, install it .... explode the page count ad-nauseum.

I have a (theoretically) working crane now. Broadly speaking, what I did was to widen the truss part of the existing one I had from 4 to 6 studs (actual size would be 5, but there's no good way to build like that and secure to the turntable) stretched it slightly (it was a little short) and then added the axle/slider mechanism from whatsuptoday's design. While doing so I managed to find a level picture taken at the height of the top of the tower. The beacon mast scaled about 50 feet high (2.5 decks) above the top of the crane; significantly larger than in any other LUT I'd looked at. Luckily that corresponded to one of the more readily available sizes of tube. I will be updating it with big tubes or barrels, because after double checking it's width turned out to be a bit over a stud in size, not substantially less as I'd assumed. It's not visible from the outside, but I redid the counterweight to be completely solid to make it heaver and able to apply a larger counter-torque to whatever is suspended from the crane. The string path, from top to bottom: Through a gap between bricks. Then down a hole through the turntable itself. And into the machine room. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be any tiles with holes in them which left me with a choice between this, or having a 2x4 plate with 3 holes on the top of the machine room. (no 2x2 variant of that either.) And then into the machine room itself. I had to punch a hole into the floor to fit even the smallest size of spindle, which means there's no chance of being able to work gearing to link the two arm axles inside. I may make a final attempt to rig the linking gears outside the machine room, but my earlier struggles suggest that doing so would be much easier said than done. I suspect it also means there wouldn't be room to install an elevator hoist. To deconflict with the cross braces, I'd need to come in from one of the short sides and then try to find a way to route the string over to the center of the shaft (where the crane spindle is) before sending it down. A working elevator was relatively low on my priority list, but with it officially not happening I can redo most of the floors to cut into the shaft instead of working around it to make them somewhat stronger. Lastly, I discovered I had the stairs/ladder to the crane roof rotated 90* from the correct orientation and had to fix that as well. This was a lot more fun than trying to contort piping around the service arms, so I suspect the next things I work on will be the white room, the tail service masts, and hold downs.

I was well over 4k before I even knew the feature existed, and copy/paste worked quite well thank you. What's left on my todo list is almost entirely tweaking existing copy/pasta to add unique elements. Creating directions was never part of my original plans. I was asked about possibly putting them out along with an LDD when I was done; so I've taken a look at what's available out of the box. However scope creep and underestimating what I was getting myself into has put me so over my time budget that any sort of major additional work to support doing so is out of the question in the short/medium term.

Are you interested in bug reports for bricks being added to the instructions in an order that's physically impossible to do (eg bricks added in one step, the part that attaches them to the model in a subsequent one, or a brick not being added until others that surround it completely have been added) in a large (>5k bricks) MoC without any submodules, or does their lack make it a case of my doing it wrong?

Over on Ideas I saw a mention of Blueprint, which is capable of generating instructions from an LDD file without needing any major handholding to get it started. It actually manages to do a somewhat reasonable job of it too, way better than the madness that LDD did with my LUT on the rare occasions early on when it wasn't so massive it froze up anyway. Once I adjusted the page size to enormous so the entire model fit, the only major failings were hinge/axle/pipe related. It would create hinged subassemblies attached at the top from the bottom up over several steps, put out all the white pieces sheathing an axle before the axle itself, and put the axle based cross beams I had in the a-frame on with only their bottom hinged in place. It was certainly ugly, but probably could be followed by a patient user who wasn't particularly comfortable with using LDD/etc alone as a building reference.

This project's already so far over it's time budget that had I known I'd never have started it. Anything I don't absolutely need to get it over the finish line is out of the question at this point. I won't say I'll never be bored enough to try at some point in the future, but the odds of it happening this year are almost zero.

Are you sure, I don't see it in that group, and searching for the part number 27507 doesn't return anything at all. EDIT: The discrepancy was due to there being a newer version of LDD out that I didn't have.

The updated export script appears to've worked, and after taking long enough that it appeared to've crashed lpub3d was able to open the model too. A few minutes of poking around failed to figure out a way to do anything useful though. If it'd require manually designating all 5000+ bricks as part of steps 1 to ~1000, that's never going to happen.

I did briefly a few minutes ago. Assuming LDview is representative, it's missing parts problem is at least eight times worse than the other two editors combined. There're at least sixteen bricks from my moc that are missing.

Assuming it builds well I'll probably share the LDD. But between LDDs auto-generated instructions being awful, the amount of work that I imagine trying to manually put instructions for a >5000 brick MoC would be, and the need to do a non-trivial amount of brick painting (many of the white axles in the arms range from stupidly expensive to non-existent, and the need to bend them around in weird ways means that most probably can't be sheathed the way the pipes in the tower are) mean a full set of instructions probably won't ever happen. The fact that neither LDD nor Stud.io have 100% of the bricks I need doesn't help either. (LDD lacks macaroni tiles I want to use on the top around the crane, stud.io doesn't have the 1x4 fence pieces.)

Progress has been slow because on top of the heavy workload on the job I've had to deal with, I've been feeling burned out on the project the last few weeks. I have managed to finish the 5th and 6th arms though.

As I'd expected I've been too busy the last week and a half to do much, I did complete the deck uplifting though. It turned out a bit more extensive than I'd originally panned. I ended up lifting the L60 deck by 2 plates not 1, and then raised L30 by 1. I then followed up by starting to tile the L0 deck. I didn't want to do so because it's going to add a significant amount to the total build cost ($20ish if I change to light gray, $60 if I stay with dark gray) but doing so solves all my stair alignment issues and is probably worth it overall. I only have a handful of tiles down so far because doing all ~600 is going to be an exercise in tedium that I haven't been bored enough to try. The other impact was that I had to replace the L60 cross beams with 5M axles instead of the 6M ones I was using. Currently I've got them in white in LDD because the only ones in red are stupidly expensive, but I'm probably going to end up either replacing them with something else, or cut down a pair of 10M red axles and use them instead. Assuming a few don't turn up at a reasonable price anyway.

that's a path to where the file was saved on your computer

How far down, I went all the way to late December, and nothing relevant searching for pdf.

It's been a busy week, so I haven't had much time to work on my LUT. What I did do was to run all the remaining tower interior piping, leaving the arms until later. Arms 5 and 6: Arm 7: Arms 8 and 9: The one interesting issue I've ran into is that the H2 pipe terminating at the top of L220 (above arm 6) doesn't appear to actually go anyway. The pipe going down to the arm is ECS from the other side of the tower, the pipe itself appears to just stop halfway into the tower interior. One of the savethelut diagrams indicates that arm 8 (service module) has an H2 vent line, and the familiarization PDF has an H2 schematic showing a connection to there (drawn on the outside of the tower). It's possible that the H2 line does run the interior of the tower to L300 to connect to that arm; but there's not enough room on the interior to model a pipe running through all the floors. I am considering terminating the pipe on my LUT a floor lower at 200 (where the unmodelled 3rd pipe ends), even though it won't look quite as good IMO. I've also done another upload to bricklick to sweep for problematic part selection. In what shouldn't've been a surprise about half the white axles I've used are in non-available sizes. I'm not sure what to do here. I don't particularly want to sheath these pipes because the scale disparity is much more noticeable here than elsewhere in the tower. That leaves going gray or painting the pipes as the most reasonable remaining options. Buying longer white axles and cutting them down might work, but as rare as white ones are I'd rather not go there. Of additional minor interest, the 1x4 red fences are much more available now than they were a few months ago as additional lots of used bricks have worked their way into seller inventories. The 2x2x5 lattice trusses have improved a bit, but they're still the ugliest parts to procure. Nominal bricklink ordering prices are about $615 all in, $560 excluding the two parts mentioned before (although I will need a few more of them to top up my initial rare parts orders). I'm thinking my next task if I get a long enough period to work on it will be to move the L60 platform up 1 plate. Once I do that I can put in an order to let me build to level 100 or 120 as a structural integrity test.

I stuffed the numbers above into a spreadsheet. The upshot is that, excluding deck 60 (and to a much smaller extent deck 30) which are slightly low, my tower has a vertical scale of 112.06:1. At 110:1 it's 7 feet (6 plates) short, at 112.6 to one it's 1.8 feet (1.5 plates) too tall at the level 380 deck. At deck 200, since that's where the initial that isn't right reaction occurred, it's 3.7 feet (3 plates) or 1 foot (0.8 plates) low/high. Playing around a little more with scaled images/screenshots like I did a few posts up, and it looks like the largest error was with the schematic drawing I had in the middle being ~10 feet too tall at the top of the LES tower, which on closer inspection can be seen because its engines descend deeply enough into the base of the platform to make it ~10 feet too tall. T

It's been a long day at work (and is looking like it might be a bad week), I can give the heights/spacings of all my decks easily enough but don't have enough brainpower to try adding them up to see where it comes out as. All of my deck surfaces are 2 plates thick. There is a 23 plate open space between decks 0 and 30, 22 plates between 30 and 60, 17 between 60 and 80, and 15 between all higher decks. I'm probably going to raise deck 60 1 plate to even out 0-30 vs 30-60 and reduce the anomaly on 60-80. I'm reluctant to try lowering deck 80 by a plate because it would mean only the top deck is sitting on the taper (with the bottom wrapped around), I'm concerned that would weaken the critical joint transitioning from the taper to the main tower too much. (I found the bulk of this a week ago when working on the stairs, at the time I thought 0-30 and 30-60 were equal with 60-80 1 plate off, but then I went in and counted while trying to figure out what was up with the stairs being more of an issue on those levels than expected.) Before today I hadn't. After spending a few minutes in LDD I'm inclined to pronounce the hose tool unusable without integration with a VR system to provide 3d input instead of just 2. I'm using these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07485T22B/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 I'd been meaning to see how close the white was (for painting gray/black axle ends), so I took the opportunity to test the silver/gray color at the same time. I'd say the results for both colors are no worse than for red, depending on the lego color the white might be a bit closer. The gray's a bit farther off and although it doesn't really come out in pictures that well has enough gloss to look distinctly silver. My OCD is pressing me to buy a second brand of pens to see if they're any closer of a color match. I probably will do so, but haven't yet because these run a bit over a dollar each. Getting a good gray might be an issue because it looks like every set has silver instead. I wish I knew where to find an art store closer than a 90-120 minute drive each way, color matching would be much easier done in person. Bright light: Low light:

I had a brief panic when moving up to start on arms 5 and 6. My notes indicated that arm 5 had H2 and ECS connections, and that arm 6 had LH2, LOX, and ECS. When I went to look at where the H2/LOX pipes were coming from though, they appeared off a floor. The H2 pipes were in line with the floor below arm 5, and the floor where arm 5 was attached. The lox pipes were on the floor below arm 5. This resulted in much checking of additional sources - my working assumption being that I was somehow one level off with where the LOX/H2/LH2 pipes were coming off - all of those turned out to be good though. The problem turned out to be the Lego S-II was seriously off in scale, it's about 20 feet too high where it begins the taper, and the taper is only about 10 feet high instead of the actual 20. This resulted in the arms from the model I've been heavily redesigning as my own being displaced upwards significantly. Arm 5 was in line with floor 220 instead of 200, and arm 6 halfway between 220 and 240 instead of in line with it. Comparison of my lut, a schematic drawing of the tower and S-V, and a picture of Apollo 13 on the pad to verify the diagram is correct. The purple line all the way across is level 200, and should be roughly where the rocket tapers between the S-II and S-IVB. I think I'll be able to get reasonable looking results lowering both arms to slightly above their correct heights. Part of me wants to try fixing the S-II and S-IVB stages, the rest of me is bopping the first part over the head with cluebats and shouting variations of "don't do it" and "are you insane". The hundreds of hours I've sunk into this project so far answer the latter in the affirmative, but I'm not planning to screw with the rocket at this time because I really want to be done designing and start building soon.

Arm 4 is done, trying to get 3 pipes wrapped around it was painful, the worst bit though was trying to get the universal joints used on the lowermost pipe bent in 2 dimensions adjusted closely enough that LDD would let me run the last axle from the joint into the holder.

Work on the arms continues to progress. I shortened the end structure on arm 1 after realizing it was slightly too tall. It could still serve to loose a plate in height buty there's not really anywhere I could pull one without breaking its structural integrity. I have the ECS and LH2/LOX piping mostly done for arms 2-4, although there's still a bit of placeholder purple that I need too swap out for final colors. For Arm 2 that includes extending the one pipe out enough to make room for the access stairs going between it and the inner pipe. Arms 2 and 3 are done, 4 still needs reworked to have pipes attached and extend closer to the rocket body.

No spares, so I stole on out of the rocket body. The pen tip was able to get into all the interior crevasses so I'm good for painting. Will need to get some sort of tweezers to help hold the bricks while painting them though.

Got my set of paint pens in, initial test results are up. Lego red on the left, painted on the center and right). In bright light: On the bottom: And in low light: Overall I'm fairly happy with the results. I might buy another set of pens to see if I can get a better match, but especially for a semi-obscured interior part where the lighting will be dim I think this is a close enough match. I had a bit of trouble with edges rough from play wear, but any parts I paint would be new. 26047 is new enough almost its entire stock is new, and no one has significant stocks of used bricks yet. The test on black shows that the paint is almost completely opaque. There may be a very slight hint of original color showing though; but not enough to be worth experimenting with. The only potential risk I see is if I'm unable to get in around the interior part of the bar. I think I might have 1 or 2 spares in black from my Saturn V, I'll have to sacrifice one to the testing gods.

I haven't had a lot to show for the last few days because I've spent most of it trying unsuccessfully to get any of several alternate hinging setups to work out nicely in the taller sections of the tower (principally the 0-30 and 30-60 gaps, but owing to the influence of the roof bricks in the tapers legs the 60-80 foot section's slightly taller than the other 20 foot platforms too). At this point I've fallen back on the old 26407 based anchoring system and have paint pens on order from Amazon; if I can't get good results with them or other paints I'm probably just going to end up with white landings. I do have some limited progress on the 1st arm though, by tilting the piping slightly I was able to connect both output O2 pipes into the one feeding into the arm. Lack of space closer in meant I still had to merge them before going out to the arm. The arm itself has been tweaked with the piping connected a bit nicer now. I do currently have 2 different designs for the tip of the arm, the one above which has a better shape for the white part at the bottom of the arm, but which has it and not the red/yellow upper structure in contact with the rocket and one which has that correct but the wrong orientation for the slope at the bottom of the white part (below). Unless I can squeeze a plate out of the hinge itself though I can't combine the good parts of the two alternates because they use different bricks to rotate the studs back to vertical instead of oriented along the arm. I'm not sure which design I'm going to use yet, but am leaning towards the latter. The actual arm for reference: The last thing I've played with has been the pricing of whatever I use to clad the pipes, it worked out as about $75 to do it with 500 2 brick tall 62462's - which have the liability of a slot on one side - or $105 for 1000 1 stud high 18564's. Not sure which way I'm going to jump at present, I will probably order a dozen or so of the latter (I'll need some for shorter segments either way) and seeing what they actually look like in use.

I've got a first pass at the LOX piping from L30 to Arm #1. The valve complex is still in placeholder purple. Realistically though, although it's nothing but fiddlybits, the scale's almost certainly too small to detail anything there, so it'll end up staying just a box. Biggest disappointment so far is that while I was able to get 2 pipes coming out of the valves the inner one of the two is conflicting with the stairs and can't be ran forward to the arm. I could shift them half a stud in the valve complex itself to avoid that problem, but would then be lacking in any suitably compact way to connect them to the axle the arm's turning on; which would be offset by half a stud. Beyond that, I'll probably end up tweaking the connection to the arm itself to use a universal joint and eliminate the staggered connection at the tip.

Thank you. I've redone the top stair/ladder once again/ This version's a bot less messy looking around the landing. The only way it's not quite perfect is that the top section is sitting on the edge of the stud. I can tilt it back enough that I can fit a tile on top, but that leaves the top section almost vertical.