howitzer

How about contest about biomechanical beings? So creatures that represent biological entities but with mechanically actuated limbs and other internals. Creatures that walk, crawl, flap, flail, hop, sway, wag, etc. but are not obviously robotic in nature. To make it extra challenging I'd exclude the use of Mindstorms and other parts that rely heavily on programming, as this is Technic and not Mindstorms contest. While Technic as a product line is mostly about vehicles and construction equipment, I always like to see something that breaks the mold and expands into other areas of Lego building.

I come to these forums for in-depth discussion and analysis on new sets, parts and Lego in general, including TLG itself. Tips on building techniques, awesome MOCs and other discussions are of course a great addition. In short it's the multitude of different topics and viewpoints why I find this forum interesting and history of almost two decades with searchable archives makes it all the more worthwhile. The forum format also helps in that majority of the comments are written as proper sentences and easily readable paragraphs. As others have pointed out, platforms like Twitter of Facebook are not very good for high quality discussions and especially for proper archival of past discussions. Blogs do serve their purpose, but their format is less of a discussion and more of someone telling something and audience listening so they don't facilitate exchange of thoughts in equal manner. The glory days of forums are of course in the past, but they still serve a purpose in a way that no other platform can. I do use Facebook but forum-like discussions are somewhere between difficult and impossible in there, and Twitter isn't even worth talking about in this context. I'm also someone who's slow to adopt new technology (my most important "social media" is still IRC) so I'm perfectly comfortable using forums. For this I hope that Eurobricks goes on for a long time and I thank all the administrative staff for giving us your time and resources to make this forum work.

It was fun to participate, although my entry was finished very hastily and I couldn't make it work nearly as well as I wanted nor look as good as I wanted. Maybe I'll take the time to finish it up better some day and learning from here, I hope to make better entries for future contests. Oh, and congratulations to the winners!

"Enough" is when you, while building a MOC, never have to stop building because you don't have the necessary parts to continue. "Too much" is when you do have the correct kinds of parts but it takes so long to find them that you rather stop building. Yes, "too much" is sometimes less than "enough".

15: 10 3: 6 9: 4 11: 3 2: 2 19: 1

You can find all the info you want regarding motors in here: https://www.philohome.com/motors/motorcomp.htm

Lego is in desperate need of a new official lighting system now that PF along with their lights have been phased out, but set-specific lighting kits seem a bit odd, is there really such a big market for those?

17. Aardvark So, roaming around the wasteland is dangerous, but sometimes you find treasures. This time it came in the form of an old army base, which had mostly been thoroughly looted with all the weapons and such long gone, but there was something that the previous looters didn't understand: an Aardvark Area Mine Clearing System vehicle. It's not fast and it's not armed, but it's heavily armored and equipped with a device to force through almost any kind of obstacle you can find in the wasteland: a mine flail. While it's originally meant for clearing minefields, it can also be used to plow through a fortifications and such, while the crew are protected inside the armored cabin from almost any weapon the marauders of the wasteland might carry. Functions: - Flail spinning and height adjustment - Drive with tracks - Steering, with independent double wishbone suspension Sorry for the poor quality video, it's the first I've ever made and I had very little time to film it. http://www.jousimo.fi/lego/aardvark.mp4

So, lately Real Life struck me pretty bad and I was left with very little time to finish my build properly. So after getting it functionally good enough, I threw together probably the most half-assed exterior ever to cover it up. I also found out that the single hard spring on either side isn't strong enough to support the weight of the rear side so I made an emergency fix with additional spring to prevent it sagging too much. I never got around to actually testing the motorized functions until today, but a bit surprisingly, they mostly work as intended. Steering and flail height work perfectly, except there's no automatic centering as I didn't have time to program it into Brickcontroller. Drive also works, but flail doesn't spin as fast as I had hoped, and both of them together make it's movement really slow. A short video showing the flail and movement in operation: http://www.jousimo.fi/lego/aardvark.mp4 I couldn't film the steering and flail height adjustment in action, as I couldn't take video while operating them on the same phone. You'll just have to take my word that they work exactly as I had hoped for :) Some day I might try to finish it properly or rebuild it entirely. Or not. We'll see. But here's a few photos of the "finished" entry: A short video showing the flail and movement in operation: http://www.jousimo.fi/lego/aardvark.mp4 I couldn't film the steering and flail height adjustment in action, as I couldn't take video while operating them on the same phone. You'll just have to take my word that they work exactly as I had hoped for :)

Vehicle sets tend to be smaller than buildings, and smaller sets are much easier to sell and probably are also cheaper to design and produce. Combined with the swoosh/wroom-factor, vehicles are really easy to sell to kids. Buildings of course often include vehicles, and I think it's because buildings too need to have something movable to make it interesting to kids. A vehicle is by far the easiest way to include a moving thing, as it allows a lot of freedom in motion and helps in making your own storyline, as opposed to mechanical gimmicks built into the buildings, as they tend to serve only a single purpose with not too much room for imagination. Technic, as a theme is of course all about mechanical gimmicks built into the models, and vehicles are a natural focus there with their many mechanical parts, so as a result I'm not sure if there has ever been a non-vehicle Technic set, except as alternatives (B-models or multi-sets).

Do you think you could make the tail fin somehow more closed, something other than just an outline of the shape? With the otherwise enclosed bodywork it seems a bit out of place now. Other than that, great work, I love space sets! 8480 is something I missed as a kid and would want to get my hands on but even the used sets are quite an expensive today so seeing a reincarnation of it being designed is always a delight.

Oops, I have almost forgotten to update my progress. The vehicle has come far from what it was in my previous update, so here is some new progress photos Firstly, these two photos will hopefully show how I planned to do the drivetrain for the two mini-LA's doing the flail positioning, they are driven by a PUP M-motor with 16:24:8:24 reduction. The other PUP-motor will be used for steering. You can also see here the driving ring for the selector of the flail rotation, which is driven by the PF XL-motor also responsible for driving. The next two photos show the current situation, as you can see the whole contraption is taking shape. Exterior is of course still not even really started, but mechanically it's mostly complete, save for some bracing. The flail shield geometry has to be adjusted a bit though, as the flail now sits too low. The PUP battery box will be placed on top of the PF box. I changed the previous suspension assembly for a basic double wishbone suspension, but even there I had a really hard time figuring out how to make it work. In the end I think I succeeded, though it remains to be seen how it actually drives. I have never really built a suspension+steering assembly before and with these small wheels you can't use proper suspension parts so it's a bit of a custom build.

I have added a couple of previously missing colour variants and made some minor readability upgrade. As for the new colours in the upcoming 2H sets, I'll update those when the sets are officially released.

The dumbing down is huge. Instructions for 8868, a model packed with complex functions had a grand total of 32 steps. 42096, a model with only a couple of very simple functions had ... 504 steps. What changed during the 27 years in between?

Ok, the colour row is now pinned so that it's always visible when scrolling. I also updated the descriptions to include a link to BL. I also rearranged the list a bit so that mirrored versions of each panel are right next to each other.

Thanks for the feedback, I'll try to make some improvements when I have time.

I'll think of updating when new panels are released (not sure how to get the relevant information, as I don't buy most of the sets) but I want to keep it up to date. You're of course free to copy the sheet and maintain your own list. I thought of that, but enlarging the photo makes the list a lot longer and with the small images the whole sheet can still be viewed on a typical computer monitor. I think the names are descriptive enough with the small images.

... Is probably a question that has crossed the minds of many people, me included, while planning the exterior design of their MOCs. So I created a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MdCtQMN_kaaMzyWy_blFLJNzT05f4dCxXS1Nx3DhfDU/edit?usp=sharing I listed every part in the BL "Technic, Panel" category and their known colours (according to BL names and colour codes) and marked it on the list. Some parts are probably pretty uninteresting to most builders, while others may be quite rare so this is not a guide on how to use the panels, but with this list you can easily check if the panel types you need exist in the colour scheme of your choice.

Technic bicycles would be awesome. And not just regular ones, but you could have cargo bikes, recumbents, etc. TLG would only need to introduce a couple of wheels suitable for bicycles and I'm sure the community would take care of the rest.

Agreed, Lego is among the very best use of plastics there is, a product that is of high quality, infinitely reusable and can take a lot of use and abuse in its intended usage environment before breaking. As a kid I had Legos from my parents generation and now I have passed those bricks to my kid. Not many toys are regarded as something to be inherited over multiple generations.

Thank you @Bartybumfor everything you said. Electric cars are already here and they are getting cheaper and better all the time, already rivaling gasoline driven cars in the middle-class family cars category. Charger networks are also constantly getting better so, there's no reason not to choose an electric car over a gasoline driven one for most people. Only for heavy trucks and such all-electric is not yet a viable option, though lighter trucks and vans are too very much available. It's going to take a decade or two to replace current fleet of gasoline cars with electric ones, but all in all fossil fuel driven cars are a technology of time gone by. As for the environmental impact of electric vs. gasoline cars... it depends mostly on how the electricity is produced. Where I live some 20% of the electricity is produced with fossil fuels and the rest with renewables and nuclear. With fossil fuel plants shutting down, electric cars are also getting greener with no action on the car owner part, while with gasoline car the only option is to drive less. Of course, from environmental perspective, the best option would be to not own a car at all and use only public transportation and bicycles etc. but the sad fact is that most people are not willing to give up the comfort and luxury of a car easily enough for serious and quick reduction of in total number of cars.

A few different crater rock pieces would indeed be an awesome alternative to a raised baseplate.

The old cratered baseplates were nice, I wouldn't mind seeing those produced again, perhaps with relatively shallow profile to make storage easier and with on-grid studs in crater bottoms. As for the other kinds, @icm said everything that needs to be said about them. I have never really liked even the flat baseplates because they have different height than normal plates and can't be attached from the bottom. I realize they are meant as the very bottom of a build and are cheaper to produce than normal plates (relative to size) but I wouldn't mind getting a normal plates in 32x32 or similar size.

Very nice! The motor doubling as boiler is indeed very nice and I like especially the departure from the usual "very adult construction equipment or fast car"-style that's most common in Technic. Just a thought, will you allow your kid to play alone with it? And what if they start to disassemble it?

Digitally designed models also bear a risk of containing parts/colours which are very rare and expensive unless you very carefully look up each part's cost and availability before using that part. If such a pieces show up, you'd have to carefully consider if you really, really need to use that part or if there's an alternative. For example, from what I hear, some train wheels can get pretty expensive, but there are no good alternatives except third party parts so it can be difficult to replace them. Most used parts in Bricklink cost somewhere between 0,1 and 1€, so if you use no parts that are especially expensive (or a lot of very cheap parts), you'd end up somewhere around 200€ per locomotive - plus shipping costs.