danth

DUDE. Okay, that bulldozer is my favorite of everything you've done so far. The giant wheels, the dual cockpit, the ingenious brick-built blade made of alternating UFO wings, the TRIPLE INTAKES. Good god, it's glorious!

Very unconventional yet cool spaceship design, almost a nautilus shape! I can't even figure out how you SNOT'd it all together. The trans-orange windscreen looks perfect with the gray and the selection of prints you chose.

Very clean, very classy. I like the orange stripes on the base!

DinoTron is a Classic Space theme that could have been. It features space vehicles that turn into dinosaurs! Main Colors: Red and Light Gray Windscreen Color: Trans Yellow Secondary Colors: Black and Trans Red The AI mothership of the DinoBots faction has taken an extreme interest in an ancient extinct kingdom of lizard beasts from a distant planet called Terra. So much so that it has extracted DNA from Terran fossils and synthesized it with cybermech technology in order to create robotic vehicles that transform into Dinomechs. These Dinomechs exceed at traversing harsh alien skies and landscapes. The main units are the AeroDactyl Jet Bike and the Ankyl-biter Drill Rover. Of course they both transform into Dinomechs. The Drill Rover morphs into an all terrain walking dinomech, while the Jet Bike turns into a flying dinomech. The Drill Rover frees power crystals from alien landscapes using its laser drill bit. It transforms into mechbeast mode to deal with rough terrain and dig up buried crystals. The laser drill turns into a weaponized tail whip to fend off ornery megafauna. You can see the transformation video here. The Jet Bike is for exploration and scouting. It can land in order to investigate possible resource deposits up close. More pics on flickr. Thanks for looking! I'm pretty proud of the Drill Rover transformation because all the parts lock into place in vehicle mode using clips. I'm going to try to post a video showing the transformation. Also, sorry for the crappy photographs. I have literally no photography skills. I'm going to work on that!

As for the work question, very interesting...over half of Eurobricks users are liars. Kidding!

Wow, an actually well done survey? Short, with easy to answer Yes/No questions? How is this possible? Usually the offsite surveys we're asked to do here are terrible; impossibly long with vague unanswerable questions.

I'm a sucker for transformations, and Blacktron:

I wish Lego would make, like, actually good mechs. Like this:

When you say large, does that mean bigger than minifig scale? How did it compare to Lego in terms of sticker usage?

Not news about new sets, but an old Blacktron 2 prototype. I won't spoil it, just give it a watch! For the impatient, you can skip to about 3:30.

I do love me some raised base plates. As an adult, I can be careful enough not to break them, and I can factor in large parts when considering PPP...but the space they take up is a concern for me. It's the one thing I'm running out of. I guess it doesn't matter if you're displaying the built set anyway. If you break down and store the set, you can stuff the parts in the hollows of the base plate as well.

You mean these? Because I saw that once in a build where I was like "What the what? Why?" I would just assume that's a money saving/inventory utilization thing but if it's really to prevent stress on parts, that's another mind blower for me!

Actually I wonder if Lego has guidelines to discourage sets from having plate connections that are hard to take apart.

Here's a video by RR Slugger (who I greatly recommend) where he drops this bomb: Lego has moved from brick-based construction to plate-based construction. It's an astute observation that I hadn't heard before, and it's kind of a mind-blower. People often talk about Lego using smaller parts, which is obviously true in a lot of modern sets. But calling it "plate based construction" makes you think. Plates and tiles (and small curves/slopes) are of course smaller than bricks, but they're also much harder to take apart. Which means you probably won't bother to take your sets apart ("I ain't breaking my nails, and I can't find my brick separator"). Which means you're not engaging your creativity to build your own MOCs, you're just leaving a set put together forever. Which is what a lot of people mean when they say Lego isn't about creativity anymore. Now, I'm not prepared to argue that it's true that Lego has shifted to more plate based construction. That's just a matter of looking at all set data from the past few decades. But it definitely feels like they have, seeing as sets keep shrinking in size while maintaining similar piece counts. Of course the regular Lego cheerleaders will miss the point completely, calling "plate based construction" a ridiculous charge, just because Lego sets still use bricks, while ignoring the ratio of bricks to plates changing. The more sophisticated status quo warriors will point out that many old sets were mostly plates. This still ignores the point that the overall ratio of bricks to plates across all sets might be shrinking. I don't think plate based construction is bad either. Just less much conducive to taking sets apart, IMO. It does. I was working on the above comment before you responded, but it touches on a lot of what you said.

Thank you for sharing! I thought it was a great video. I agree with it, for the most part. I'm sure depends greatly on geographic location, but the Lego store I frequent seems to be about 50% adults with no kids. To me, that's massive. I think it's a pretty open secret in the toy industry that adults are a huge part of their market now, with kids mostly obsessed with video games and phone apps. "LEGO isn't for kids" certainly isn't literally true. It's just a click-baity way of saying that their focus has shifted so far towards the adult market that it affects everything they do, including their more kid focused sets, and I think the video argues that point pretty convincingly.

That's crazy that people would try to haggle on Bricklink. That's some dedication to being a tightwad!

And not a spaceship but still very cool:

A bunch of cool spaceships! https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrutek/32174862690

Ahh, right right right. I knew I didn't understand it, but now I see why. This MOC is pretty mindblowing, especially now that I understand the mechanism, and see that there are landing gear, too. And it just looks so good! Bravo!

If you put a plate under the white ingot tile, would it but up against the studs on the red brick enough to hold everything together?

This looks great, especially the angles in the main fuselage. The R2 unit looks cool too. I don't understand the mechanism or how it's broken so I'll just trust you on that. I just know it looks good.

I was recently reminded of how much I like 40649, and in retrospect I should have included it in my top 5. Not sure what I'd remove though.

I loved the head cockpit gimmick in 40649. Hopefully we'll get some sort of cool surprise in the Space version.