hagridshut

Ideas is great for finding out what the Lego super fans want, but I think Creator 3-in-1 might be a better choice for gauging popularity among children and more casual buyers. Most of the Creator 3-in-1 sets are town oriented, but I've seen some Sci-Fi sets like a robot and a starfighter more recently. Creator sets also don't use stickers, as far as I know, which I find to be a big plus

Wow, I really like the Twin Starfire in black/orange! I didn't know that the cockpit bay pieces were no longer made. The vertical landing retro-rockets on the 924 are a nice addition too.

I never owned any of the classic Pirates sets, but I did have the opportunity to help build and play with both the Black Seas Barracuda and Caribbean Clipper in the early 90's. "Pirates of Barracuda Bay" brings back a lot of memories for me. This is an excellent set. It manages to capture the spirit of the original ship, and simultaneously add fresh design elements with both the island wreck configuration and new Black Seas Barracuda configuration. Well done LEGO! Kids and adults alike will love this set

I gave up trying to keeping track of everything. If I'm not sure I type the character's name into Bricklink to see if a minifigure entry is there.

I would buy this, because it is an interesting spaceship design. The last Star Wars set I bought was the U-Wing from 2016.

I imagined that the canopies were colored because they had filters to prevent ultra bright light from stars or spaceship drive plumes from blinding pilots. Now, I wonder why a SciFi spaceship would even need a cockpit or bridge canopy at all, because most of the piloting is done by computers. External visuals can be gathered by camera and transmitted to a computer display inside a ship if the crew needs to see what is going on outside. Many SciFi ships, like those from the 2003 Battlestar Galactica and The Expanse, do not appear to have any exterior windows at all on their command decks. I think the 2003 Galactica had one big window on an observation deck for recreational viewing of the cosmos.

I've become very interested in the Creator 3-in-1 "mini-modulars" after adding a Corner Deli to my spaceport (I figure that Lego astronauts would appreciate pizza, hot sandwiches, and cold drinks when they are working on a base tens of millions of kilometers from Earth). The 31105 Toy Shop/Town House is a set I'm definitely thinking about adding to my collection next year. I like the buildings with the red/white awnings, and the small tower on the roof is a nice touch. Mini-modulars are also a lot better for my budget and storage/display constraints than the Creator Expert sets. I would change the Toy Shop into a spaceport robot shop by modifying some of the toy micro-builds. Astronauts could go to the shop to buy different robots for specialized missions.

I prefer in-house Space themes, but I do buy some Star Wars sets. Agreed here. The colors of in-house space themes are saturated and are very eye catching. The use of transparent colored canopies is much more appealing than the transparent clear or smoke gray typically found in Star Wars sets. My collection has few Star Wars sets, but the ones I buy are designs that differ from the usual array of X-Wings, Y-Wings, and TIE fighters. I own no X-Wings or TIE fighters, but I do have a U-Wing (from the 2016 Rogue One film). The swing-wing mechanism gives the model a unique dual-personality, because the ship looks vastly different depending on whether the wings are swept forward or backwards. I also own Anakin's Starfighter from the Clone Wars series. The profile of the ship actually reminds me a bit of the 918/924/928 series from Classic Space, and the color scheme has a nice bright yellow that contrasts with dark gray. I added some dark blue pieces to give the ship a color scheme that matches the Unitron minifigs. I also very much enjoy the crazy and random ideas that result in the in-house space themes. Emmet's Rescue Rocket (from TLM2) and Space Police Drop Ship (from The Lego Movie) are 2 recent examples of in-house spaceships in my collection that I bought because they were different and creative. I am a Star Wars fan, particularly of the Original Trilogy, Clone Wars animated series, and Rebels animated series, but I prefer Lego's in-house designs to their Star Wars offerings, and my collection reflects that. I only buy Lego Star Wars sets that have nice color schemes and/or designs that haven't been rehashed multiple times over the past 20 years.

Nice! I like that the rocket can land vertically and has crew compartments in vertical configuration. This is much more futuristic than Lego's current City/Space offierings, and also allows for artificial gravity if the engines can supply continuous acceleration.

My picks for 2019. I haven't given much thought to "worst" yet, as I tend to gloss over uninteresting sets and themes rather than think about them. Best Theme: Hidden Side. Despite my initial skepticism, I've grown to appreciate the creativity of the sets, and the use of Augmented Reality to add another "dimension" to the theme. The YouTube animated shorts are entertaining as well. Best Minifigure/Figure: Rex Dangervest with Jetpack. Although I detest the movie character, this minifigure is very awesome in a Mandalorian sort of way. The dual molded legs and prints of powered armor elements make this minifig a great addition for any SciFi Lego enthusiast. Best Set: Emmet's Dream House/Rescue Rocket. This is one of my favorite spaceship sets of all time. It's both a cozy home and a long-range exploration vessel with a lot of potential for modification and expansion. Worst Theme: Worst Minifigure/Figure: Worst Set: Most Anticipated for 2020: I'm most looking forward to new 3-in-1 sets and new Harry Potter scenes. 3-in-1 buildings usually have a nice assortment of components and no stickers. I eagerly await the next round of expansion modules for the current generation mini-figure scale Hogwarts Castle.

I'm not the target market for this set (out of my price range, and I'm a Sci-Fi/Fantasy Lego builder), but I think it's great. Details are very nice. I love the tree in Fall colors out front. The detail on the beds is very nice, and the buildings overall have a cozy charm. The molded iguana is hilarious too! Being able to "camouflage" the creature on the bed is just fun.

They actually seem "alive" to me, not in the physical sense, but sort of as instances of a computer program running in my brain.

I had some spare time over the past 2 months, so I built some prototype spaceship MOCs: small stuff with piece counts that would have been equivalent to sets in the $3.99 - $7.99 range back in the 1990's. It takes a lot of work to design something of equivalent quality to an official Lego set with a modest amount of pieces. Getting the size, aesthetics, durability, and playability just right requires a lot of tweaking and experimenting. This gives me much appreciation for all the design work and iterative testing that Lego workers conduct on new sets. I am fortunate now to have enough loose pieces to experiment. I remember as a child thinking that my builds were never as cool as the official set designs, although my design abilities became significantly better as I got older. This made me somewhat reluctant to disassemble models, but I did it anyways because I needed the pieces to build my next idea.

Impressive work! I appreciate the same-scale comparison with the Babylon 5 model. Zathras mentioned in one of the episodes that Babylon 4 was the biggest of the Babylon stations, but it was somewhat difficult to understand just how much bigger, since the 2 stations were never as far as I can recall ever in the same scene. The rotating section on Babylon 4 is just enormous compared to is counterpart on Babylon 5. I'd read somewhere that Babylon 4 had its own engine system and could relocate as needed. This probably made it an ideal headquarters during the ancient war with the Shadows.

I'd consider that hypocrisy rather than political correctness.

Anakin's Jedi Starfighter 75214-1 $16 (20% off) at most stores, since it has been out for awhile. The shape vaguely resembles the Classic Space 918/924/928 series spacecraft, except R2-D2 sits where the astronaut would sit, and the pilot sits higher up in the rear, where the cargo area would be on the '24 and '28. Anyhow, I also bought the set because I wanted to build a ship for my Unitron mini-figures, and the yellow/dark gray color scheme is very close to the Unitron astronauts' colors. I added a dash of blue by trading some yellow flat plates for blue ones, and it now looks very good with a Unitron pilot in the cockpit. I may switch out the smoke-gray canopy for a trans dark blue canopy, but it'll do for now.

Interestingly wide array of categorizations! It never occurred to me that the colors could be used to signify different national origin. Growing up, I and my friends had our own LEGO "nations", but everyone had mini-figs from the same group of themes, so it was impossible to make national categories based on mini-fig colors or prints. MOC architecture (ships and buildings) was the way we distinguished "nationality", since everyone had their own style of building. I never knew that these designations existed. I had thought that mini-fig colors were randomly selected for each space set.

Surprising news. I purchase items only sporadically on Bricklink, but it has been an excellent reference resource for sets and components. I am adopting a wait-and-see perspective on this event.

Classic Space and Futuron minifigs came in many different colors, unlike the more uniform appearance of minifigs in most later themes. Did you assign roles to particular uniform colors? For my astronauts: Yellow - Pilots and front line guys. This was mostly a function of the fact that most of the Classic/Futuron spaceships I owned happened to come with yellow astronauts. The Twin Starfire, Xenon X-Craft, Stardefender 200, Hovercraft, and Auxiliary Patroller are examples. Most of my spacemen are of the Yellow color. Blue - Scientists and Medical. Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy wore blue Starfleet uniforms, so I made blue minifigures assume similar roles to these Star Trek protagonists. Red - Logistics and operations. Black - Engineers and designers. White - Admirals. I used Space Police I minifigures in this role as well. Grand Admiral Thrawn (Star Wars) wore a white uniform, so I made the white-uniformed spacemen the top brass of the fleet. M:Tron, Blacktron, Spyrius, and Unitron were different organizations to me. Ice Planet guys had a similar planet/spaceship logo to Classic/Futuron, so I assumed they belonged to the same organization, with a specialty in being explorers of places with cold & harsh atmospheric weather rather than hard vacuum.

I don't believe that "political correctness" has anything to do with the decline of traditional LEGO themes, nor do I believe that fantasy elements had anything to do with the decline either. As a child, I thought that the Castle theme was fantasy. Several of the sets included glow-in-the-dark Ghost mini-figures. There were also some sets that had a blue wizard with a white beard in the 1990's. The use of magicians, the supernatural, and green dragons were all indicators that the theme was based on fiction rather than reality. Space was similarly not that realistic. The ships looked nothing like actual spacecraft of the era. Also, the conflicts between the different space themes were fairly mild in that they were generally limited to theft and espionage. Specifically, I remember Blacktron II plotting to steal Ice Planet satellites, and a Spyrius commercial I found on YouTube centered around Spyrians trying (and failing) to steal items from Unitron. It wasn't until the 2000's that Space became noticeably more violent: one of the Mars themes centered around armed conflict between human colonists and Martians, and the 2009 Space Police III theme was much more militaristic than its predecessors. IMO, the growth high volume of licensed rather than in-house themes is purely driven by market demands. Kids grow up reading Harry Potter and watching the movies. Movies like Frozen and the Marvel series are a huge driver of demand for toys. With only so much engineering, product development, advertising, and other budget to go around, LEGO group is naturally going to place more focus on what keeps their business afloat.

The mid-80's through the mid-90's is my favorite era of Lego Space. I enjoy the originality and creativity of the sets from that period. They aren't tied to any detailed storyline, like Star Wars. There are only some generation notions of what the different factions represent, and it's up to the set builder to create their own stories. The fact that many of the ships and bases are simpler and more "open" than Star Wars or Avengers sets, practically encourages people to add and modify the designs. I was fortunate enough to own an Intergalactic Command Base in the mid 1980's. Over the years, I modified, disassembled, and rebuilt many iterations of this base. After Spyrius and Unitron, I lost interest in the new Lego Space themes. UFO introduced big custom pieces that I felt weren't as flexible in use as previous themes. I didn't particularly like the designs of Exploriens or Roboforce sets. This dislike of the newer space sets contributed to my exit from the Lego market in the late 90's. I continued to look at Lego products on a casual basis during the next 15 years, but it wasn't until the early 2010's that I picked it up again as a hobby.

[deleted] Nobody was interested.

Star Wars is just one of many themes that Lego sells, so from a financial standpoint, I think the fallout would be minor. Also, if the TV show "The Mandalorian" becomes a hit, that could counteract any disappointment with "Rise of Skywalker". Mandalorian warriors and ships, and their opposition, should make for some interesting set designs. Sets based on "Rise of Skywalker" might sell well regardless of the movie's popularity at the box office, if the designs are interesting. Based on YouTube reviews, I was pleasantly surprised at the improvements in the re-designed Millennium Falcon set for "Rise of Skywalker". I'm glad that Lego didn't just rehash/recolor the previous model. Nice looking sets with great play features will get attention and sell on their own merits. There are so many variables at work that it is difficult if not impossible to say for sure what would happen. Personally, I don't particularly care what happens to the Lego Star Wars product line. I own a handful of Star Wars sets, like the Rogue One U-Wing, but I always preferred in-house themes to licensed themes.

Reminds me of the Firebat unit from the video game StarCraft. An arm with a hand or other grasping machinery might be useful for lifting and clearing away items that cannot be burnt with the flamethrower. I like the design very much though.

Most of the old Lego sets I own are from the years between 1985 and 1995. None of them used stickers, and the prints are in remarkably good shape for toys that are about 30 years old on average, and saw heavy play when I was I child. I do not believe that current era stickers would hold up as well over the long haul. I personally do not like stickers. Aligning them properly is often a real annoyance. The colors often don't match the bricks. For example, white stickers practically never match white bricks and plates to which they are attached, causing unevenly colored surfaces that annoy me. Black stickers end up having a thin white "border". The edges of the stickers pick up lint and dust over time, further affecting aesthetics. I understand why Lego uses stickers, but I don't like it. When I buy newer sets that use stickers, I will apply as few stickers as possible. If the set's aesthetics or function aren't affected by the lack of a particular sticker, it will stay off. Stickers also have 2 other problems: Replacing them in the future can be inconvenient since Lego does not sell replacements. Stickers are often damaged or creased right out of the box. Someone earlier in the thread said that stickers would be more tolerable if Lego open-sourced the graphics. I agree. If I knew that I could download and re-print replacements, I would feel better about long term collection maintenance.