toastergrl

Thank you very much, Vindicare ^u^ If you have any suggestions for other things to tackle, I'd love to hear them!

This build looks absolutely fantastic. While NCS as people tend to think of it isn't exactly my thing, you're neither allergic to exposed studs nor addicted to greebles AND you've managed to create a chunky, endearingly shaped ship, which I seem to have fallen in love with. The cargo transport gimmick! The multiple containers! The perfectly angled, inset windshield! I love it, and now I am tempted to try and build my own spin on the vehicle type. That's probably one of the clearest indicators you've done something inspiring with its form.

Thank you very much, everyone! Yeah, small sets are magnificent. Sometimes the £9/$10 sets contain things with a similar spirit like the Space Squad that started this all, but it's the things that you put together while experimenting that really carry some pleasant energy. Unfortunately, it's the same situation in the UK as it is in the Netherlands - the polybags are almost never found here! The Magazine builds are quite easy to get, but when City's not doing Space, it isn't exactly my thing - so I have to pass those things up. In other news, I did a small Bricklink order and a smallish ebay purchase yesterday. If all goes well, I'll have some Red Spacers in my collection soon enough - and with that means more MOCs...

Hi, all! I really enjoyed the Dimensions release of the Sonic the Hedgehog character, but found it a little lacking that we only ever got that one figure and a tiny build. I got back into LEGO in a big way with the release of TLM2 and the help of 70841-1 Benny's Space Squad, and realised that there was nothing stopping me from experimenting with my own. To that end, I've been working on a series of related builds since early February (although bits and pieces come from abandoned LDD files from 2016!) For those interested, I did publish this as a LEGO Ideas project back in late February, and it's already past halfway to the goal. If what you see in this topic takes your fancy, it would be very much appreciated if you supported it. ^u^ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- To start with, I decided to challenge myself by creating a collection of builds that looked like it might be an official LEGO set - with an economical use of parts, conservative use of new printed pieces, and a heavy emphasis on play features. The result was this - a number of small figures, two modules that could be connected together, and a giant robot because mechs are awesome! But the mech holds another surprise... ...it can be opened up to reveal a bigfig Dr Eggman (or "Robotnik", if you're so inclined)! The Eggman build was inspired by the Hawkodile figure from Unikitty 41453-1 Party Time, and it's the only thing in this topic I've also built physically as well as digitally (with some minor substitutions). Unfortunately, LEGO is a little costly to buy a ton of parts every time I want to make another build for this... Another thing I'm quite proud of is the spring function. By hammering a technic lever down, anything on top of it can be launched in the air! This is an adaptation combining two features I've seen in official LEGO sets - the spring component resembles a feature from Minecraft 21130-1 The Nether Railway, where a small button makes a Magma Cube move up and down, while the lever component draws more inspiration from the Go-Kart launchers from the Summer 2018 Friends wave. By this point, I'd already published the first group of builds, but I still had the drive to keep on going - so I started out with extra modules, each containing new action functions. This one is a falling platform! Flick-fire missiles are fun, don't judge me - even if the jumping fish badnik had to be compromised a little to work as one. Also - apologies for the text superimposed onto this image; I didn't save unmodified copies when adding it. If I had thought ahead, I probably would have saved them seperately. At the very least, I took care not to obscure anything interesting. One of my favourite set of builds is the Hard Boiled Heavies, though. They're an entertaining team of Badniks with great designs, and converting them to LEGO was quite fun. I did have to edit in a lot of fake prints, but I think they definitely came out quite well, given the limitations of the medium and the desire to stay in-scale. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- If you'd like to see more pictures of these and other builds, please check out my Flickr album! I intend for this to be a living thread- whenever I have a new build to add onto the project, I'll make another post in this topic. In any case, thanks for taking a look! <3

Thank you very much, everyone!! It's fantastic that you managed to keep the sets from your childhood, @TeriXeri. I never had anything CS-themed, but I sadly never kept ahold of my Mars Mission or BIONICLE stuff when I was younger, so I'm a little envious. :P I'd love to be able to pick up Nexo Knights stuff, but it all seems to have cleared out of stores by now... That's sweet of you to say, @AmperZand! I would say they're basic detachable shuttles - for escaping or for travelling down to the planet's surface without losing a lot of fuel. I like your City Space mod, although I must admit the windshield is a little less convincing than I'd expect from the colour. I've done one of my own, which I'll show off now that I have a few other builds to go with it - I ended up leaving the windshield off entirely, even though it doesn't have any anachronistic curves... ---------------------------------------------------- The reason I made this post today is that I have more builds to show off! I ended up relenting - this is my second copy of 70841-1 Benny's Space Squad, and the next time I see one in person, I'll get a third. And more minifigs means more opportunity for vehicles, so... Big Classic Space stuff is fun, but the real meat and potatoes of the line was tiny extra vehicles. Neither of the ones pictured closely adhere to any existing design; the Transport Buggy has a bit in common with 886-1 Space Buggy, but only by necessity of size, while the Star Hopper only uses part of the name from 6806-1 Surface Hopper, which it has some superficial similarities with. I really, really love them, I think - the Star Hopper especially really comes together in such a small number of pieces. Can you believe it's only 10 parts? Perhaps my favourite unintentional development about these two little builds is the fact that they can play together organically - the fact that both the DBG crate and the Star Hopper have four studs on their underside means that it doesn't look out of place mounted on the Transport Buggy. Aside from the obvious Space Squad parts, these builds include a handful of pieces from 60191-1 Arctic Exploration Team and 75224-1 Sith Infiltrator, the latter of which I basically only bought for LBG parts. The extra white airtank, meanwhile, is from the City set I'll next mention... ...set 60225-1 Rover Testing Drive, which I modified into the Mobile Exploration Rover! By replacing the gunmetal Mars Mission-style wheels with rubber-tyred ones from two copies of 70821-1 Emmett and Benny's Build & Fix Workshop, and systematically stripping away anachronistic Pearl Gold and Trans-Black parts, I've made a pretty coherent homage to the latter-day "white vehicle" aesthetic first appearing in 1983 but taking center-stage in '87. To that end, it's being driven around by a blue Spacer minifig, which is associated with that era through sets like 6972 Polaris I Space Lab! It's not a perfect encapsulation of the design sensibilities - especially with the claw arm in orange instead of blue, due to the new clamp-half piece only being available in Bright Orange - but I feel like it doesn't look completely out-of-place amongst those builds. It's definitely super fun to drive it around and have the arm pick up random parts to place in its truck bed, at least! Two extra 13-long technic beams were requisitioned from my pile of parts in order to mount the wheels the desired width away from the body. I do not know the set these came from, but it would not surprise me if it was a BIONICLE set from the mid-2000's. ---------------------------------------------------- Your interest is very much appreciated. Thank you for taking a look at this topic update ^u^

Your feedback is appreciated, @-zenn! I'm glad you like the Sonic Mania stuff; I've been thinking about starting a topic to track its progress given I only gave it an initial mention in the Ideas topic in the Embassy, but I don't know whether it'd go in Licensed or Special LEGO Themes... Personally, part of the appeal of Classic Space is that it's so aggressively back-to-basics. Modularity and action functions are fantastic, but sometimes a build just needs to be straightforward and theraputic, and that's what the titular fleet is to me. If I had to make the things include Real Drilling Action or what have you, I think I'd miss out on that. As it stands, "rolls on its wheels", "spins the radar dish", "can hold up a spaceship without falling over" and "splits into multiple vehicles" are gimmick enough for these display pieces. I have plenty of appetite for features, but I think it'd require a more action-focused theme to really get the mindgears rollin'! I did have that thought about police stuff, but it seems to be so minimal on actual regular classic bricks - the solid ones are usually white or DBG, while the blue stuff is generally awkwardly sized plates, curved surfaces and the like, the kind of stuff I took off the Galaxy Spearhead in the first place. I may have to go for Classic boxes instead...

Thank you very much, @jan kusters! ^u^ Taking a quick peek at your flickr, I'm pretty awed by your stuff. Even disregarding the excellent photography, your builds are pretty appealing. Definitely unmistakably vintage LEGO, but wow, part and parcel of the look I'm persuing. Good luck experimenting with your own approach, but you've already got something pretty good going on! Minor update to this topic, btw: I just picked up 60225 Rover Test Drive, stripped off the gold parts and put Kenny (the yellow one) in it. I think it definitely makes a fine white-vehicle era CS rover, windscreen print aside! It's legitimately a shame that part's never been put out in trans blue, whether light or dark variant. The orange may be a bit of an anachronism, but I like to imagine it's a kind of hazard indicator. No pics at current because I've barely done anything, but the next time I have something big to show off I'll definitely include it in the periphery!

That's pretty fantastic. Wonderful job!

Thank you all very much for your kind words! ^u^ Some more specific responses: The space dart is super cute! I wish those weird support beam nosecone parts were still in production so I could build my own variation on it. That's a real shame that you ended up giving it away, too... I gave away all of my early BIONICLE, so I know the feeling, even if it's a different line x_x;; Nice thought about the ADU; unfortunately, Alien Conquest fell smack dab in the middle of my dark ages :'c I gotta go back and at least pick up a polybag or something... There's so few sets with bright blue and LBG in tandem these days!! Making it enclosed would've been nice, but unfortunately I can't get a minifig down there properly as there hasn't been any large trans yellow plates for a good while so I figured jamming a space seat inside the Unikitty hole would be a good substitute. I do LIKE the mechanism enough to not remove it, just saying the flapping pods attached to the fuselage above the wings were a bit much and I've dealt with 'em accordingly. Good thought on having an entire minifig station there, though! Interestingly enough, while I do want to build a Vic Viper of my own at some point, I personally really like the vintage LEGO mandate of "no military stuff in Classic Space". I feel like that concept sets it apart from the more modern approaches... I've always seen the ship-mounted weapons as stabilisers and the handheld ones as for destroying asteroids, not other living creatures!! Nice Astro-Watevra! I've been meaning to pick up the Series 11 or 12 Astronaut (I forget which) for that flag, too. Thanks for reminding me :P

Hi, denizens of the Sci-Fi forum! Despite being like 30 years too young, Classic Space is definitely one of my favourite themes. I don't want to just pick up the old stuff, though (that'd definitely get expensive) - I want the experience of making my own MOCs and set mods to fit within the ecosystem. To that end, I've finally managed to take a bunch of pictures to show off my stuff. What helped kickstart this stuff was the sheer cheapness and easy availability of 70841-1 Benny's Space Squad, of which I am barely restraining myself from getting multiple copies of. From there, it was an easy leap to 70821-1 Emmett and Benny's Build & Fix Workshop and its Space Cruiser build. I did end up picking the Ideas Exo Suit, but had a few issues with it - it was way too neoclassic for me. I can understand that greebles are of interest to some people, but that level of overdetail is not for me. To that, end, I decided to make my own, classic-style Exo Suit. From there, the rest of this spiralled outwards and upwards to greater and greater heights. Utilising the Mixels ball joint system, my classic-ised Exo Suit is remarkably stable and sturdy, and I think I managed to approximate the studs-exposed, detail-less style of the original sets quite well without having any vintage design to base it on, whilst maintaining some visual continuity with the bulky, large-armed shape of Peter Reid's design. In homage to the original Exo Suit, I think this pilot's name is Yvenny. (Sorry, Pete - your name can't be enny-ised while remaining recognisable!) I've lifted her helmet up a little bit to try and make it look like the classic helmet without having a green version of that part available. Maybe eventually... The Traffic Control building on the right, however, is both more and less original at the same time. While I built it entirely out of parts I had on-hand without adhering to any instructions, the design has ended up quite similar to the space shed packed in with the original Galaxy Explorer. I would have liked to include a Classic Space logo print part, but the dang Benny BrickHeadz is way too expensive now. Oh well... Just a little showing off on how good those ball joint parts on the Exo Suit are. It can hold the space cruiser from 70821-1 Emmett and Benny's Build & Fix Workshop above its head without any external support! (It looks like the antenna on its back is providing some of the support, but I promise you that no weight is on it and it's just a clearance thing!) Benny, of course, is mortified. "Don't drop Jenny and my sibling!" he cries out. Yvenny's doing too good a job to care, though. This goliath is definitely the centerpiece of my collection. I really liked 70816-1 Benny's Spaceship Spaceship SPACESHIP!, but had some qualms with the more ostentatious elements of the design like the flickfire winglets, the rounded nosecone, the Technic missile housings and the excessive greebling across the board. I've made a few customisations to help make it fit in with a simpler-looking crowd! One of my chief missions with the simplification of this thing was to reduce its reliance on Dark Bluish Grey/Dark Stone Grey parts, since that was a big distractor. While I haven't been able to find replacement parts for the underside or the big octagonal plate, things are a LOT cleaner now and I'm much happier for it. You'll also notice I didn't apply any stickers. (Well, that's not quite true - I did apply the computer screen stickers and reactor core stickers on the inside, but I don't have a consistent enough lighting setup to get good shots where they'd be visible.) The way I see it, adding stickers just means a way I can mess this up. I don't have the steadiest hands, and this thing is way too good for that kind of treatment. I named this the "Galaxy Spearhead" in homage to both the Galactic Spearhead and the Galaxy Explorer, two LEGO builds I'm not likely to ever have my own versions of. As much as I like LEGO, it would be irresponsible to have it take over my budget like that... To top it off, a group shot of one of each of the true-classic minifigs I have, plus another angle of the Exo Suit! More pics are available at my Flickr! That's all I have for now, but maybe I'll have more to share later. Thanks for taking a look! ^u^ ---------------------------------------------------- Update #1 - Star Hopper, Transport Buggy, and Mobile Exploration Rover Update #2 - Proto Light Hover, Rocket Launch Trailer, Stellar Comet, and crowd scene

Found this tweet the other day after all the hubbub about sets being cancelled... Tweet from Matthew Ashton, Design VP at LEGO and Executive Producer on TLM1/2 As he's strongly hinting, a set containing the Disco Benny minifig design is definitely still coming at this stage, which suggests to me that we're at least going to see the third wave this year and yalls've been panicing over nothing. :P

"60229 [four/five letter word] lab". The first number is the set's ID, although I can't quite decipher the four/five letter word beneath it... It's a bit clearer at the link Digger Of Bricks provided, mind!

I'm going to be unoriginal and maybe a little repetitive re my previous answer, and say "more classic space stuff". There's a number of ideas in your list that could work out very well, but the number one issue is that I prefer to be surprised rather than waiting for anything specific, when it comes to anything other than adding to groups already created - which then becomes an exercise in completionism, which I'd rather not get sucked into for anything but Classic Spacers.

It's no secret that The LEGO Movie 2 and its surrounding media contains the obvious CMF-bait of the Fox Girl, with newly tooled suit not present in the final assortment. In addition to her one-scene cameo in the movie itself, she's present in the TLM2 video game - alongside some other interesting likely-to-be-from-a-CMF designs. There's new attempts at some of the Fabuland characters using the standard minifig bodytype and newly-tooled heads, but the real star surprise is Denny, the Red Classic Space minifigure notably absent from Benny's Space Squad. Basically, my wish is that this deduced-through-context-clues CMF assortment doesn't end up cancelled because of this movie's more unsteady performance in the box office, so we can be that much closer to a full assortment of stable retro-shaped helmet Classic Space minifigs. I'd definitely like black and green (and maybe blue - an undamaged Benny is admittedly wishful thinking!) versions of those helmets eventually, but the red one is by far the most obvious missing gap right now given how prevalent they were in the original line.

If you're unsure on the colours you should use, it might be worth trying out digital building software like LDD, Stud.io, or Mecabricks, which allows you access to a vast library of parts to play with without spending a penny. Stud.io in particular is good at having an option for hiding colours for pieces that they've never been produced in. Once you've made the decisions on what and how to put it together, then you can start purchasing things on Bricklink, PaB, or Bricks and Pieces. This method of working has been pretty lifesaving for me as a student with no meaningful LEGO budget at current!

Huh, I didn't realise licensed set pieces could turn up in the stands. I thought it was all excess stock from the CMF series, along with a few specially produced pieces every now and again to draw the collectors in. The more you know! It's cool that it doesn't bother you, but one person being comfortable doesn't mean everyone is. I know it's entirely feasible that plain minifig heads in darker tones are more expensive to get ahold of, but I'm talking large Neoclassic displays the kinds of which could only be built only by those with a very healthy hobby budget. If they have vast quantities of rare and expensive pieces, the outcome of not including reddish brown or dark nougat heads at all when there's a reasonable variation and representation in the faces of the Light Flesh (mustaches, grins, masc-coded and femme-coded, youthful cadet, grizzled adult...) starts to seem less like a factor of cost and more like an eyebrow-raising oversight.

Good pointers! I'll give 'em a look, thanks ^u^ Absoluuutely. As I figure out exactly what kind of builds I want to make for my own personal and community display as an active AFOL as opposed to a passive instruction-following one (spoiler alert: very blue and spacey), I'm continually drawn to the rollercoaster system as a very fertile area of action function experimentation. I've already mentally prototyped a track switching system limited only by the fact I don't own any of the necessary parts. I may end up having to get the Creator Pirate Coaster before it sells out completely and LBG track becomes limited to approximately-£100 sets for the forseeable future (like a certain enthralling City leak which I will almost certainly probably pick up anyways)! You make a lot of good points to refute my perspective, but this is by far the most salient one. It doesn't matter whether I've managed to "gotcha" the LEGO minifig brand lawyers or not - the fact of the matter is that they're failing a reasonable chunk of their consumer base in a very invisible way, with the huge walls of solely yellow Make-Your-Own-Minifig stations in LEGO stores. Speaking of, I recently went digging through Flickr for inspiration on builds. Is it just me, or are the huge Neoclassic Space displays where everyone's a white-coded fleshie fig extremely uncomfortable? If you're going to break the tenuous ambiguity of the existing yellow-faced spacer lineup, why would you subsequently lean into the racially suspect undertones? I can't presume guilt until it's proven because these people are almost certainly not intending to be exclusionary (and the parts are probably from Star Wars sets, which isn't exactly representational itself), but it's a hell of a blind spot to have for sure. Has there been any discussions amongst AFOLs regarding this kind of thing?

I gotta admit - completely unrelated to the topic at hand, the linked post is fascinating and everything on his account is candid and brilliant and I stayed up until 1am last night just getting completely absorbed in everything he was sharing. Are there any other recorded instances of LEGO employees speaking about information that isn't necessarily confidential but they don't tend to share with us, aside from Mark Stafford's posts on here and Brickset? I especially find his general sentiment re monorail fascinating - loving it but knowling it's basically impossible to do without a huge shift in the kind of transport projects invested in IRL. Calling it "elevated rail" is a new one, though, and brings to mind the roller coaster system introduced with 2017's TLBM. Knowing that new "systems" take significant lead-in time and engineering effort, I wonder if these two aspects are related and rollercoaster track-and-cart pieces are seen as the spiritual successor to monorail in-house. A quick search suggests 41347-1 Heartlake City resort uses the parts as a monorail, which lends crecedence to that idea! (I'm not one of those monorail nuts - way too young for that, I just like LEGO in all its forms. :P ) EDIT: This in particular is also something really thought-provoking to consider. I absolutely think this is an inevitability because of one shot in the original TLM, although it might take the better part of a decade for the other shoe to drop with respect to regular minifigs like with City and CMF. This is three original minifigure designs in a consistent, modernised, virtual theme, where Reddish Brown is used to represent a darker skintone and Yellow is used to represent a lighter one. To that end, Pandora's Box has been opened; they can't feasibly state Yellow is universal and raceless when this was approved by the people within the company responsible for managing the public image of the minifigure, in a way presented to the silver screen. (I consider the 2003 NBA series to be an interesting forerunner to this decision but not a clear indicator one way or the other as LEGO's brand police were not nearly as on-the-ball as they are today.)

Aaah!! I'm so sorry, I didn't see the following messages - I'd been really busy working on university coursework up until midday today, and online forums had to take a backseat for a bit. Your kind words are really appreciated, and I'm more than happy to share my secrets! I used Studio 2.0 (Bricklink's LEGO design software) to build the structure, which has a built-in renderer. I might admit I cheated a little bit, though - those prints aren't baked into the parts. I drew the original flat print sketches in MSPaint, then composited them into the image in post with GNU Image Manipulation Program (or "GIMP"). Since I come from a digital art background, it's a little easier for me than messing around with baking vector art into LDraw files. You know what? Your praise is PHENOMENAL, FANTASTIC, SO INCREDIBLE, WOO-OOH (thank you >u<) Meanwhile, I'm pretty dang impressed with the Steamboat Willie set. That's, like, an extremely major improvement on the original concept, and the whole deal with the action functions is right up my alley. The only obstacle is the price, and... ouch, that price. It's a tough thing to balance, though... hopefully we'll see more like it from Ideas, but based on stuff that doesn't have the Disney tax.

It probably shouldn't surprise me that that model was made by a Eurobricks member! It's impeccable, and congratulations paokus on your success. On first brush I feel like it would have difficulty passing review because that looks D2C-sized, but then again, Voltron... I wonder how the name would be handled, given the... legal questionableness of a certain website that that shares it? "Pirate's Cove", perhaps?

This seems to be the place to link your personal LEGO Ideas projects, right? I hope I'm not commiting a faux pa by posting this too early into my time at Eurobricks, but it's been on my mind and I want to be able to relax and enjoy the rest of the forum without having the idea of posting this nag at me in the back of my mind ^^;; Here's mine - Sonic Mania - Green Hill Zone. There's a lot of play features in here that makes it a bit more than just another generic IP-based Ideas set, including a functioning flick-action spring and an articulated mech with extending arms that can be piloted by a brick-built bigfig. I had a lot of fun intentionally trying to recreate the sturdy, detail-agnostic*, play-focused design style you can see in standard themes, while still maintaining relevance for the "Hey, I recognise this!" pop culture collector. Notably, it's managed to earn 3,000 supporters in a week since its inception, and as of this post is still #2 in the "Trending" tab on the front page. This is owed to having recieved some big attention - Kotaku and Gonintendo, for example. I'm not hurting for supporters right now but figure I might as well share it while it's hot. More pictures are available on my newly-minted Flickr account! *well... official sets don't usually chase detail above all else, but they don't intentionally avoid it either! If you can think of a better word than agnostic to describe this, I'm all ears.

Fair enough! I have literally never touched WoW so good to have the origin clarified, your original wording just made me curious ^u^;

This line looks incredible. I don't really care about the app, but I'm definitely above the age range where TLG would think that a problem. I like the designs of the main characters a lot - Parker and the professor (Is her name JB, or is that someone else in the line?) are both really nice minifigs, especially. I'm probably only going to go for the boat, bus, and lab, but mostly because I can't really justify larger sets right now. It's a novel theme, and I definitely want to support that.

My personal hope now the colour is back in action is for minifig parts in Teal (er - I think the TLG name for it is Dark Turquoise..?), preferably City-adjacent but I wouldn't complain about Space. My sigfig contains a dark green shirt and blue jeans as a reasonable approximation, but there's just something about that colour that's very appealing and I'd easily swap the hoodie out for that. As for part shapes... one thing I've wondered about a bunch is ID 2460 (Modified 2x2 Tile with Pin), but with a plus-axle instead of a pin. It would be quite useful for load-bearing SNOT technology, and if combined with ball joints ID 32474 or ID 53585, it'd make for a nicer, more elegant system-constraction interface than those modified 2x2x1 bricks that usually crop up in the one or two larger, too-big-for-Mixels-joints mechs a year.

Thanks for the welcome, everyone! @leafan interesting... Were you a BZPower member too? It'd be interesting to see whether we might be the same one :P