howitzer

That ball-socket idea sounds cool at first look, but I'm pretty sure the kind of complexity in the latch would make them far too fragile to pass TLG's quality requirements. Also there would be at least 6 or 7 new moulds involved, which could also be used to making one-piece links in new lengths (and orientations). Just a couple of more lengths for links would in itself make our life so much easier.

Sad but true. The part you mentioned would indeed make for a great addition, as would more lengths of the link part discussed earlier. I would also really like to see a friction pin with cup to accept ball-joints. Then there's of course the endlessly discussed new gears & stuff, to make better gearboxes and new parts for better steering assemblies and so on...

Now's our chance: https://www.newelementary.com/2022/07/contest-make-wishbrick.html What would you make?

I wonder how much wind these would produce if used as a motorized fan...

98585 could also be used as a three-axlehole connector but of course it's not ideal either.

If you want to make a crane, you'll first have to think what movements a crane has and then you'll need to think how to control those movements. Would it be a remote controlled crane with human operator, or would it have some kind of automated motion sequence which it does when commanded? Either can be made with the PU app, but you'll have to know what you want first. The app lets you combe command blocks into a functional program. If you have absolutely no programming experience it can be quite a difficult to make anything complex, but there's tons of general programming tutorials for beginners online and some for the Powered Up app too.

Personally I'm really hoping it will be held somewhat later this year, maybe starting at September or so. Or at least there should be a lot of time to build, considering how fiddly GBC modules can be (requiring much of tuning and testing and rebuilding). I'm going to move soon so I must pack all my bricks and then get everything in place in the new apartment so that's going to make my participation quite hard if the contest starts in the July or August.

I don't think shorter links would be any more specific part than various lengths of liftarms or axles are. Links are perhaps not as universally useful, but they are still very useful for many applications and having them in more lengths would enable much easier construction in many cases. I think the ball joint-connection is pretty underused way of attaching parts, especially in Technic, and adding few more links and pin with a ball socket would expand the opportunities here enormously.

I am preparing my balls as we speak.

Right, that settles it.

There's one motor for sure located fairly low and rear, behind the red tapered panel. If that's the only one the bulge on the top is probably there just to hide the base of the rotor (which sits much too high relative to the real helicopter).

If the battery box is at the bottom (logical, as it must be opened), perhaps it's the motors (I assume there's two) which are at top, forcing a bulge along with the gearbox.

By all accounts this appears to be the best thing TLG has ever released in this category. Reviews should be up in a few weeks and then we'll know for sure.

There's the GBC contest of course, but I assume you still haven't found a GBC expert to volunteer for running it? The walker contest of course could be far enough from vehicles, but I still think those are hard enough to do, repeating the low participation of the transformation vehicle contest. Aircraft are vehicles but with the release of the Airbus helicopter and it's new rotor parts, I wonder if an aircraft contest would be possible? No size limitations, can be either manual or powered with PU, PF or the usual third-party stuff.

Is there another type of vehicle which has been released in single year in 4 or more different sets? Helicopters are very common, that's a fact. Airplanes are less so, but still there are as many of them as there are excavators or tow trucks so they aren't exactly rare either. The first decade of the 2000 indeed saw very few aircraft but those were really bad times for Technic in other ways too. It's true that aircraft has never been a flagship beside 8480, though some of them are still quite large and functional like 42052, 9396 and 42025. The new Airbus could be considered flagship, it being the largest Technic set of this year excluding UCS Ferrari (those are generally considered their own category) and assuming the Liebherr crane is postponed to next year but the designation is of course debatable. You're entirely right here. I would add that aircraft tend to require large dimensions due to wings/propeller blades which forces them to be very big if they are to include more than the most basic functionality and this in turn reduces swooshability, making them more shelf queens and less something to be played with.

That's funny, considering that aircraft has been produced throughout Technic history with most years having something and up to 4 different sets with instructions for aircraft in 1996 and in 1997 and helicopters being one of the most common type of vehicle in Technic...

Does "autonomous" mean here "drives and steers without human input"? Like would it be a model of an autonomous vehicle (think of Zeux) or actually function as autonomous vehicle? The latter would require programming, which will heavily limit the participants, as it would be also a programming challenge in addition to building challenge. Walking vehicles are really neat and cool, but they are also really hard to build. There are few prolific builders of walkers and it's obvious that they are very skilled and experienced, and still have to iterate and refine their designs a lot. I could see maybe 5 participants in such a contest and certainly no more than 10. --- We've had a Small Car Contest and a Small Construction Vehicle Contest both being huge successes, so how about Small Truck Contest? Set a max width in studs and all entries must be models of road-worthy trucks (so no mining trucks or futuristic Mars-crawlers or other stuff you couldn't drive on public roads). Or is it too similar too soon to the construction vehicle contest?

Is the photo series meant to be a documentation for rebuilding? If so, think very carefully which parts you're going to remove at each step, and make sure it's easy enough to see the places where those parts came from. You might want to take a separate photo from all the parts removed at each step (alternating between those and the assembled model or what's remaining of it). Also, there's a balance on how much to remove, too many parts in a single step makes for a difficult reconstruction but too few makes a very long photo sequence. It's also helpful to keep the remaining assembly at similar angle, zoom and lighting conditions at each step whenever possible.

Something I was wondering after handling the 9396 helicopter a bit: I wonder where the center of gravity will be in relation to the main rotor? At least in 9396 it's much too far back so that if you lift the helicopter by it's tilted quite a bit towards the rear.

The surest way to achieve this would be to hard-link the motors mechanically by connecting all motors to each other with gears with 1:1 ratio. If that's not feasible, you'll have a quite hard problem to solve, as Gimmick said above.

The part in question is this:

I've only once bought directly from Lego, because almost always the sets are cheaper (sometimes by significant amount) at a certain local retailer. For example if I wanted the new Ferrari right away I should order from Lego for ~400€, or I could wait and pre-order it locally for 340€. For the Batmobile the prices are 120€ from Lego and 82€ locally.

That's pretty exceptional! I've heard of a case where a bag was replaced with another bag so there were a bunch of extra parts while other parts were missing. Customer service replaced the missing bag without issue though.

This must be one of the best alternate models ever.

Looking forward to it!