howitzer

Yes they will be noticed even by those who don't build much. Imagine sets from your childhood and compare them to the current ones, would you have become an AFOL if they used practically the same parts palette as back then? I know I wouldn't have. I also noticed the progress during my 25 years of darkness - and remember, I wasn't in any way following new set or part releases, just seeing the sets in the shelves of stores. Not everyone will notice of course, but enough do that TLG can't just retire their parts design department and call the current assortment of available parts "complete". Also, most kids will keep interest in Lego for at least a few years, many even a decade or so, and during that time they definitely would notice lack of new stuff and lose interest and therefore sales, it doesn't really matter that the parents are paying. So the constant design and release process of new parts is there to keep the product fresh, whether in short or longer term. Today it's more important than ever as competitors are numerous and would surpass Lego easily and quickly if there were no new parts releases.

Of course new parts are constantly needed, to keep the product fresh. Every new part (whether a new shape or just colour) opens up some new possibility however small, and the entire brand moves forward with the new parts. This applies to practically every kind of commercial product, stagnation would mean death for the brand and the company.

Thanks, keep us posted on your progress!

So I built 2 sections of each, sorry about the vomitous mass of colours. Upper one is the vertical variant (second in @Bartybum's post) and lower is the horizontal variant. They seem to be equally strong but the horizontal variant was much less annoying to build so I'd prefer that if I were to use these in an actual MOC. They seem to be strong in the direction where diagonal supports work, but less so in the other direction, bending quite easily. The problem seems to be the fact that there's pinholes supporting the structure against bending (either with axle or pin inside) and that gives the chords at the section joint too much play; the middle of each section is stronger (having double pins in each liftarm joint). Also, like Liebherr booms, there's nothing to stop them pulling apart laterally which might contribute to their bendiness. The other problem is torsional rigidity, which is much less than that of the new boom parts in 42146. I think the reason is the lack of diagonal supports in one direction, combided with the play every pin connection inevitably has. In the end it probably comes down to the fact that large solid parts are stiffer and stronger than POOP builds of similar shape and purpose. One thing of note is also that the sections are much longer than the boom sections in 42146, with two of these sections being slightly longer than the 4-section main boom of the Liebherr. I think this could be solved by building separate end section where necessary though. My above analysis might seem quite critical but still I think these are perfectly usable as crane booms, as long as the crane isn't being used to actually lift very heavy loads relative to its height. The horizontal frame variant was easy enough to build and all of the parts are plentiful and cheap so they might very well work as an alternative to the Liebherr parts. Though if you want some serious lifting capacity, the Liebherr parts are a better option.

Ok, I was able to view the photos now. I tried to make much more faithful reproduction of the real suspension, but was unable to make it work as Lego axles are not nearly strong enough to withstand the bending pressures involved. I guess simplification like you did would've been in order, but after working on it for a good while and failing I lost motivation (and considering it was a contest there wouldn't have been enough time to finish the rest of the build anyway). Glad you were able to make a workable simpler version though!

Thanks! I'll try this out tomorrow when I have free time!

For some reason your photos are not showing :( I even tried to follow the link to the original site and it's Onedrive showing the text "This item won't load right now" so maybe there's a problem with file permissions or something?

Looks good from the pictures, I'll see if I have time to do a test build during the weekend. Shouldn't be too hard but takes a bit of time to make multiple segments. Could you make a parts list for easier building?

Hard to really say one way or another, could also be an aesthetics thing with the truss pieces having those bar-thickness diagonal supports instead of liftarm-thickness ones that MOC makers and TLG alike had to deal with before the introduction of these new parts. I haven't really tested personally how easily liftarm-built lattice frame would come apart by twisting, but the Liebherr's frames seem to be quite resistant to it, loosening a bit first but then no more. Of course if you use enough force anything will come apart but I imagine TLG has standards on that - these are toys after all so they'll have to withstand whatever children might reasonably do to them, but no more than that.

The water bottle idea is nice, though I wonder if they wanted an easily adjustable counterweight, as in you can just add or remove counterweight pieces as necessary. Or maybe the water bottle just didn't cross the minds of designers. I think the new lattice frame pieces were necessary for the design as they allow for much stronger and simpler structure than liftarms and friction pins. Friction pins also have an unfortunate tendency to dislodge and come loose if the structure is twisted and bent a lot, unless the whole structure is properly form-locked, which I think wouldn't look that great here and also would add more pieces.

Any chance you could produce a computer image of the suspension system so we could see how it works? I'd be curious to have a good look on your implementation and the compromises you made (I tried some, but they wouldn't help enough to make it viable). I guess that's true from TLG's part, while the suspension of the real thing is quite complex, perhaps that's not enough as a selling point for a set, and beside that and steering there's not much a snowmobile does...

It looks really great in every respect! I attempted to make a snowmobile for another contest, and learned the hard way that suspension is indeed anything but simple and in the end I couldn't make it work but apparently you have, which is great! And it's a good looking model too! Makes me wonder why TLG has never attempted to create a proper snowmobile set...

There were Volkwagen T1 and T2 camper vans but not in Technic. For the iconic pop culture models Technic might not be the best platform, as looks is very important and they might need lots of stuff beside the van itself and perhaps even minifigures, so I doubt Technic will ever see those.

If we're talking about commercial vehicles with cranes and dump beds, TLG is making plenty of them. If we're talking about normal vans with no fancy functions, it's the same reason as why they don't make common cars that you see on the street every day: those don't have the fast-thing appeal of supercars and racecars, nor they have the rugged appeal of offroaders. I agree that having a normal family car or even a normal van would be a real fresh breath to the endless line of fast cars but I don't see it happening. Seems that everything has to have some superlatives attached to it these days, be it fastest, biggest, strongest or whatever. There's no marketing appeal in normality.

Yeah, some of the best technical functions lately have been in other themes, aside City there's been many sets in the Icons theme, like 10323, 10327 and 10363 with some nice functionality while majority of Technic is "Speed champions with fake engines and steering". I haven't yet built 42209 myself (bought it but have had too busy of a June) but it for sure seems to represent everything that Technic as a theme should be. But it's just one set among two dozen and the rest don't really live up to the Theme's title. There has been a couple of nice sets every year but there could be so much more. I agree that the huge RC sets aren't really ideal especially with the PU implementation, and non-RC motorized sets (like 42145) pneumatic sets (like 42128) are much more interesting. I hope to see more of those along with the likes of 42209.

I haven't done any analysis either, but it seems true that significant majority of MOCs presented here in this section of the forum are indeed cars and the remaining are mostly other types of vehicles. I think this is also evident in our various contests: the small car contest had I think highest number of participants of all time while other contests like the recent non-vehicle contest or the earlier GBC contest had quite low number of participants. Part of this phenomenon may be related to the difficulty of building different kinds of things. Cars are easy, they all share the same basic functions (4 wheels of which front steerable, fake engine, drive train with or without gearbox, etc.) while stuff like GBC's require some novel ideas and thinking, combined with difficult mechanics and time-consuming fine-tuning. So in a sense it's not surprising that people tend to build lots of cars and little of other things, and TLG's set portfolio seems to reflect that. Construction machinery is somewhere in the middle so there's more of them than non-vehicles but less than cars.

Yeah, the current trend makes it quite easy to save money on Lego. Very few truly interesting sets and those tend to be on the smaller end so cheaper too.

Yes it was, as indicated by the /s in the end of the line.

Indeed, that's one of the coolest building technique innovations I've seen in a long time, it's so beautiful in its simplicity.

It can be disassembled as it's possible to pull the axle with stop out even if it's fully inserted, though it's not easy. Still a badly thought out assembly, they really should've placed the blue pin last, as mentioned in the comment above.

It's not intended to be removed, so it probably means there's no way to get it out cleanly: https://www.newelementary.com/2025/05/review-lego-11203-blueys-family-house.html#legobluey11202

That's entirely reasonable! Perhaps I'll see you there!

That's cool, I hope the tickets aren't very expensive!

Omg, I'm actually planning to be in Utrecht at that time... how do I attend?

I agree, anything that's not a vehicle would be great.