howitzer

Thanks!

Not sure if I have time to familiarize myself with all the entries in such a short amount of time so I'd prefer at least two weeks of time for voting.

Lego.com rrp for myself is ~100€ for the orrery and 210€ for the Airbus. So about the same relative difference as my local retailer. I'm still baffled about the pricing, what makes it so expensive?

I'm not talking about discounted prices, those in my screenshot are normal prices at that particular shop.

Varies a lot depending on the set though. With something like 42055 you can just swap the motor and battery box with minimal modifications, though it might require two motors as PU XL motor isn't as powerful as PF XL. I believe many other single motor sets would be similarly easy, while sets with multiple motors (like 8285 or 9398) would be significantly harder. Full RC mod to non-RC sets is of course going to make things quite a bit harder, but that's not in the spirit of keeping them as close to original as possible.

Is it just me or is this set really expensive? Here's a screenshot from my go-to Lego retailer: Especially the Airbus seems a bargain compared to the orrery, considering you get battery box, motor and almost 4 times the parts for little over twice the price. Of course the orrery has some expensive parts like the hemispheres, hoops and some frames and many gears but still...

Oh, I hadn't seen this either. Going to take a good look on @Marno's photos and think about making my own version later when I have finished building the original. Thanks for bringing it up @R0Sch!

Yeah, I guess the best bet would be to use the load sensor in the original model, though I'd have to find out how exactly it works. I'm not really going for realism, so the exact model designation isn't that important for me. I don't think I'd be able to replicate either model accurately enough anyway to really distinguish them.

I just obtained the set today and first I'm going to build to the instructions, but then I'd be interested in doing some modifications. First and most obvious thing to do is of course extending the booms and increasing counterweight to balance it properly (probably with some non-Lego weights). Also, as there's unused motor slot in the hub of the superstructure I'd be curious to replicate the Liebherr V-frame using it and some linear actuators, which would allow repositioning of the ballast on the fly. It would be interesting to have the crane balance automatically by adjusting the ballast depending on the load. Thoughts? Here's some more info on the system: https://www.liebherr.com/en/int/products/mobile-and-crawler-cranes/customer-magazine/all-about-cranes/v-frame.html

Or perhaps the license agreement was made for three years and two sets each, completing last year and maybe the sales weren't big enough to warrant a contract renewal. After all, TLG isn't under any obligation to renew a contract they feel doesn't bring enough customers.

So today I ordered the set with a nice discounted price of 440€. Going to comment on my feelings about it when I have finished the build and played with it a bit. Hopefully I can then decide if this was a good use of my money...

I haven't really used Studio, but the pain of dealing with non-right angles in other similar software indeed makes it really difficult to work with designs involving them.

This would be great!

So... now it's discounted to 440€ which is almost the same as in Black Friday when I nearly bought it. I watched the kbalage's video about the price breakdown and according to his estimate I'd be getting the electronics and counterweights essentially for free.

This is true. Finding the correct angles is hard and requires either lots of calculations or a strong intuition built on lots and lots of experience, and for designers at TLG neither is an obstacle, while amateur builders tend to go the easy way and build mostly with right angles. Only the most skilled builders seem to manage to break free from the right angle cage in a meaningful way. Some trigonometry resource to help with this would indeed be great.

This is an interesting thing to hear from you! I suspected it could be a great build for an AFOL who knows their way around Technic, but it's nice to have confirmation on it! Now if I only could get it with good discount (at the moment the best I can get is 500€) and then get some more boom pieces along with longer strings...

By not building. I hit an obstacle which I haven't been able to solve, so either I'd have to make some serious modifications or abandon the project. Not that I haven't had much time for building either...

I believe fully RC backhoe would be too complex for an official Technic set, there's simply too many functions. Operating would get pretty difficult too, at least with phonescreen interface. Traditional compressor and manual pneumatics functions would still make for a pretty interesting and complex, flagship level set but I'm not sure if TLG would do that considering their urge to make every year's biggest set C+ (except for the supercars). I can see the problem, and it would be interesting to see someone attempt to do this.

Oh, right, it's another Lambo. I mistook it for some small-scale supercar manufacturer, which probably mostly shows how I'm not a car guy...

Yeah, B&P is pretty sporadic in its offerings both across the world and across time (parts come and go). The Liebherr parts are now pretty well available in Bricklink though.

Not sure if they would choose such a less known brand for the next supercar. So fat every licenced car has been from really well known brands and that's even more pronounced with the 1:8 supercars.

They have been at Bricks&Pieces for at least something like a month now.

It was actually in the Top Gear rally car, Concrete mixer truck and in Mini Claas Xerion in 2020 and in the Off Road Buggy in 2021. Still, it is along with the 40T gear surprisingly rare among Technic sets, at least compared to most other gear sizes.

Wow, this new part is really cool. Obviously it hasn't been created for this set, I wonder how it'll be used in the upcoming sets...

Not using differential to get the gear ratios more accurate is a kind of missed opportunity here. I'm sure many people have familiarity with the usual gear systems but using a differential to get different ratios is probably something that most people don't know about and this set would've been a perfect opportunity to introduce such a mechanism.