howitzer

This. I don't buy any Lego electric components with the expectation that they last for even 10 years of use, let alone 30. Unused parts can be preserved to be working 30 years later but if you're going to be actually using your PU motors instead of just storing them, they will wear out long before there's any danger of software being discontinued and becoming unusable.

Thanks for the tip! I'll do some sorting and see which ones I can figure out by myself and then try to take a good photo of the rest. I don't have any other camera besides a phone, but sunlight should be doable.

Not sure if this is the correct topic, but I recently bought a bunch of used Lego, and I was wondering if there's any way to easily identify the colours of various pieces? I know there are colour charts and such, but comparing to them doesn't really work for some colours, as you can't be sure your monitor is displaying the colours correctly. I have no idea about the sets which these parts come from so no help there, though most I can identify by comparing them to other parts which I know the colour for certain.

The two 1x11L cylinders to lift the blade are indispensable here, but I wonder if the third one could be replaced with a large 11L one? I know the small one is ideal here, but switching it to more affordable one would bring the parts cost down a bit... Also, is the airtank necessary or could this model work without it?

Very interesting! I was surprised to see 40T gears losing to 16T gears, as the latter has many more moving and sliding parts so intuitively it ought to have higher friction, I wonder what's the explanation here? I wonder what the effect of significant load would be on the results? Distance also matters, as with chain and bevel gears you don't really need to add any moving parts with increasing distance (unless you count the supporting bearings of the driveshaft) but with the spur gears even a small increase in distance immediately adds moving parts.

Funny thing, consumer protection of defective goods is still in effect, BUT I think it's the retailers who are going to be responsible for refunds. As the set was never officially released, it means the retailers sold whatever they sold without authorization from TLG and they could claim no responsibility for the flawed design. But yeah, whatever the reason, TLG messed up big time here. Of course probably no one will ask for a refund, considering most sets were apparently sold to AFOLs knowing what they were getting or people intending to make big money on secondary market.

This is what I thought too when I heard about the design flaw. My guess is that the design flaw is what forced the withdrawal of the set but meanwhile they used their ethical guidelines as a public excuse to justify the withdrawal while hoping it would cast them in better light in the eyes of the public, as compared to situation where a recall would've had to been made due to the huge QA failure.

Wow, this sounds really amazing, I have to wonder why there aren't such classes available more widely? Couple of years ago I put my kid (then 4 years old) into a hobby with robotics, and there they were taught with Lego, but the small kids class (for 4-6 years old) never touched anything programmable, it was strictly about mechanical aspects (gearing etc.) of robotics with PF motors. The more advanced class for 7+ years gets into Mindstorms, but suspect they might benefit a lot from the flow chart-code generator thing, and for that matter, so would adults. I, for one, don't know much about programming and I'd be really interested on using such low-bar approach in learning the basics.

I decided to limit this list to BL's "Technic, Panel"-category, because I really have to draw the line somewhere and that's the most obvious place where to draw it. That's why I didn't include flexible axles or ribbed hoses either, even if they are used a lot for similar purposes.

I attempted to list every panel as they appear in BL's Known Colors-category. That one is not listed there so as far as my list is concerned, it doesn't exist.

It's also well available here in Finland. Usually Lego sets are available for 2 years before retiring and even after that until the retailer stock runs out. Maybe the COVID-19 situation has affected availability in some countries but not others?

Dumb battery box for PU is coming though, even if it's proper release is now delayed with the cancellation of 42113 so using it you can get things moving as simply as with PF. Old motors of course work if they're not broken (I, too, have 8868 fully functional except for one missing pneumatics tube) but they are still obsolete. No replacements or spare parts are made and when the world supply of the existing parts run out, it's the end of these systems. Same is now happening to PF and it probably will also happen to PU at some point. Technology marches on and new systems are always going to replace old ones so nothing is really, truly, future-proof anyway. That's no reason to not enjoy them now though, and I'm sure there will be many useful years ahead for C+ sets with the app entirely usable for a long time. Of course support will end at some point and maybe the smartphones of the future refuse to install it, but that is the natural order of things with software. I bought computer games in the 90's which I can't easily play anymore but I got a lot of enjoyment out of them in those times and with Lego, you will at least have your non-electric parts which will always be useful for MOCs or whatever.

Powered Up is the future, but in its current state it's much more difficult to use than Power Functions. PF on the other hand won't receive any more upgrades and while all the other motors will be widely and cheaply available for many years to come, PF Servo is already somewhat expensive, so if you want a future-proof steerable vehicle, PU is the way to go. Simple vehicles (drive+steering) can be used with the current Control+ profiles of 42109 and 42099, and I'm sure that the new profile for 42114 can be adapted to many MOCs, but if you want something that can't be adapted from these, you'll have to dive into the coding of Powered Up and that can be pretty difficult. I know it would take me a good while to learn PU programming before being able to do something useful with the motors.

Yeah, but @tohan's comment was about making a set with Osprey as a B-model so it would then have to include the 6 rotor blades, otherwise it's not really a B-model.

That would be great indeed, but what sort of machine beside a tiltrotor would make a good use of the 6 rotor blade parts so that it would allow the B-model-Osprey to use those parts for the rotors? I guess one could find some use similar to that of the Sian where the purpose is mostly decorative but there's six of them and they have to be black...

That's true, but whatever the way you do it, it's going to take a long time if you want to sort by part type, there's just no quick way to do it with the thousands of different kinds of parts. Of course you could add more bins to the machine, but then your machine gets larger (and more complex with more parts that can jam/fail) so it's always a compromise between machine size/complexity and the time required. I guess that sometimes it might be useful to separate only a few types of parts from a big pile, so you could do it relatively quickly by discarding every other type of part to a single bin. Or maybe sometimes you might want to for example make a separation of Technic parts from System parts, which would also be possible with only two output bins and single pass. Or maybe stickered/printed parts from those without decorations? There are possibilities here for limited use cases.

I had the same feeling once I found about the design flaw. The insane cost and delay associated with a fix would've just made the set unprofitable anyway so cancelling is the logical option here. How this flaw escaped QA is baffling though, but at least we now have an explanation on how the TLG supposedly missed the military connotations of this set and the apparent conflict with their stated values: They didn't, they just decided there's no such conflict and went ahead with the development but were then forced to cancel the set for an unrelated technical reason.

I have to agree with this. Most people are not like us AFOLs who can take a flawed set and fix it to awesomeness, so they only get frustrated and tear the sets apart if they don't work properly. And when someone returns and demands a refund, it's more costly than not selling the set in the first place. Lego has earned its reputation with the high standards, and they must be upheld or the competitors will take over - and that would be a loss for everyone, considering that the competitors probably won't uphold the same high standards either, so we'll be left with only less than high quality products.

No air tank required for usual applications, it's there just to store pressurized air so you can turn off the pump once in a while. A manometer has also been released, but it's pretty expensive, as are the air tanks. Beyond that, there's not much that has changed since 8837 exavator, which I assume you're referring to. Cylinders are double-acting, valves work like they always did, and you obviously already know about motorized pumps. The parts have gone through minor updates, mostly regarding the change to studless system but functionally they are the same. There are also longer pneumatic cylinders available than in the 1990's, but especially the thin ones are extremely expensive, as they have only been released in one set (42043).

You could get around this with recursive sorting. If you have a pile of parts with, let's say, 1000 different part types and a machine with 10 output bins, you just run the entire batch through the machine so that in the end you'll have 10 bins with 100 part types in each. Then you just repeat the process for every bin, and get 100 bins with 10 part types in each, and repeat again to get 1000 bins of different parts. Any sorting machine would have to be extremely reliable though, because if it's prone to jamming it needs so much babysitting that it's going to be less of an effort to just sort by hand. I'm not sure such a machine is feasible for any reasonable price (let's say, few hundred euros), and more expensive (on the order of thousands of euros) one would only be useful for someone with a lot of money who hates sorting, or for those running a large BL-store dealing mostly with used parts. Open-sourcing the software with instructions on how to build the hardware could be helpful for those who like to tinker but I suspect most self-built machines would see only a little use and then get disassembled. Personally, when buying used bricks, I find washing a more tedious part of the process than sorting, tough I've never bought a large batch of mixed bricks. With smaller batches, I've just sorted the parts when laying them out for drying after washing.

Yeah, the only real reason to keep a set unopened is to sell it some day for profit. Unless that's your intention, open it, build it and enjoy it.

I'm slowly warming up to this set, as I'm itching to get my hands on some nice new Technic set and it doesn't seem like 42113 is going to be available for me. I have high hopes for the future of C+ and this set would offer a nice palette of parts to start with. Somehow though, I feel that ditching the electronics (or at least the gearbox) and building a proper suspension would've made a better set, as this sort of vehicle really must have a suspension better than what the set offers.

If the real reason for cancellation was indeed technical problems, it's even more obvious that there wasn't a proper quality control in place for this set.

Hmm, I might have misunderstood what this was about, just to make sure we're on the same page, is this only about the seller fees, or also about the customer VAT? The latter shouldn't be changing at all. The former on the other hand, is apparently being affected by TLG acquirement, as the seller fees are now subject to danish/EU tax laws. So BL sales fees now get an added VAT, which is dependent on their location, but that only affects the sales fee and not the whole price of the purchase. Customer shouldn't even see it, as they are not seeing (now a bit bigger) sales fees either. In theory, the VAT should be collected according to the buyer's location, but this is quite a complex process and I'm guessing that in the end it's the seller's location that decides which VAT percentage is being used. So for example an order totaling 100€ has 3% (= 3€) seller fee, which wasn't previously subject to VAT but now is. For a Finnish shop this means that with 24% VAT the actual fee is now 3 * 1,24 = 3,72€. The buyer still pays 100€ but the seller must now file additional 0,72€ in taxes which means that this additional cost must be covered somehow, probably by raising their prices slightly. From customer's perspective the increase isn't huge though, what they were previously buying for 100€ would now cost maybe 100,5 - 101€ depending on how much the seller decides to raise their price. Sellers outside the EU shouldn't be affected, as they aren't subjected to VAT anyway.

Why is it mandatory now but was not before?