Stereo

Technic plates and frictionless pins (grey, 2L) date back to the very first Technic sets, the 3/4 pin and half thickness Technic parts are about 20 years newer, so they didn't change the design to accomodate it I guess. Some parts like 3651 to 32013 did get modified to accomodate the thin/studless parts. 3176 is even older, there were no Technic pins, no axles... it's designed to fit studs or let bars hook through it.

Looks the same to me, in that a 1 stud vertical shift makes it slightly too high.

Yeah, it's the 1-wide version of 8-wide 4515.

The 1x6 slope is a pretty old design, first produced that slope pitch in 1983, so it's not really a surprise if it doesn't work with brackets that didn't appear for 30 years.

It's not a pinhole, it's a mold mark. So the usual dish-shape with a nub in the middle where the injection molding got clipped off. I can't find any normal combo that centers it on a pinhole. The top edge of the circle is 2 plates from the top of the brick, and it's about 1.3 plates diameter so the middle is 2.6 ish plates from the top edge (and thus since it's 6 plates tall, 3.4 from the bottom) Photo on imgur - black piece so it's a bit weird to photograph but this should bu usable to measure if you want, the plates are touching the end of the brick. The other end of the brick's a different mold so it's not necessarily identical but they seem pretty close. This one's probably from set 4012, got it in a used lot

Oops, landing gear and blurry review footage of black parts tricked me, what I thought was plates just under the connection point was the middle of the landing gear's leg, 2 studs wider and 3 studs farther down.

Sort of, this ship has little "tongues" under the connections on the main body build to help support the cockpit, so you can't connect multiple of the set to itself without modifying that.

Yeah, with the much higher part count it's probably also important for the build experience that there's not too much "bag of small black pieces", I'm just thinking about the changes they made. Personally my 'big sets I admired from a distance' era starts with Blacktron II and Space Police so I probably have to wait 3-4 more years to get an Icon that I feel strongly about. This one I'm going to wait until I hear how interesting it is to build before I decide. I wasn't really into the non-fluorescent Blacktron II/Ice Planet cmfs so I'm not actually optimistic though.

Use of yellow seems off to me, so I looked closer and I think the difference is, the original never has any yellow elements wider than 1 plate thickness on the main body (though some of that is 2x2 tiles with black printed lines, which seem to have turned into yellow grille tiles... fine). The new one brings it up to 2 studs width in some spots. And it just kinda changes it from 95% black 5% yellow to 70-30 in some spots. I wonder how hard it'll be to add in Technic pinholes on the octagonal connection points, so City Space modules can be stolen and attached to it.

I suppose the most prominent example is 42147 Dump Truck in 2023 leading 42154 Ford GT and 42172 Mclaren P1 by ~6 and ~18 months, on Dark Blue + Bright Light Orange parts which are only in those sets. It would make sense that a smaller set has a shorter development time and uses the parts before the flagship they were required for. Though I'm not sure it applies to a $40 set using parts made for a $60 set.

Rebrickable has 60198 and 60337 retiring in December 2025, as far as I know they're using data from Lego.com that lists when sets are planned to retire. Though of course until it happens it's not certain.

There's a relatively new 2x4x1 windshield that's trans-clear and could fit into that second design, I don't know offhand how difficult they are to stack. Same concept as the 3x6x1 one that's in white at the top of that build, just smaller.

I was curious about whether it came with extras in the first pictures, cause none of the stills have them, but the 3d spin does show 2 extras when it's all assembled into a single ship. I don't think they actually fit, unless their underside has a way for the Technic pins to nest into each other - they're 4 plates + 1 stud thick, so 2 of them with the pins in the space between them would be 11 plates thick and not fit in a 4 stud wide hold.

I haven't built this exact set so it's only generic advice based on what I see in the instructons, but I believe it's intentional. When the boom is extending, the cord needs to unwind so the extra length of string to get to the end of the boom can be made available.

I would hope so, but they've used regular Green for all the other Aston Martin sets that use the same paint colour.

First I was excited for the multiple $60 sets, cause it's usually my favourite price range (60-100 or so) then I thought "second colour for the Corvette, second colour for the Valkyrie"... and that seems more likely to me than multiple distinct sets.

I have that piece in a half dozen colours with the same circle on the bottom and text style, so I think they're probably real.

Should be a closed form solution with some trigonometry I would think. In z-up coordinates, use the x,y position to figure out how much parallelogram skew is needed for each motor, which effectively shortens the second length in the arm, and that simplifies it into a 2d 2dof arm which I think you can just solve using a triangle with positions of 2 vertices and side lengths known. Though one of the images in this thread doesn't actually use parallel links, which would make it complicated (and probably not actually strictly 3 translation DOF, there'd be some rotations)

I can't see how tilting the engines works, the knobs on top are to spin the propellers and fold the claw away. Maybe just a manual thing where you angle them on friction pins? The rear one connects through a U-joint so it has fairly limited range, but the side ones could hypothetically point straight up and down.

2 and 3 already have axle/pin versions, not sure the benefit of being all pinholes for ones that short.

I think it's the other way around, the energy recovery system's always connected and the selector chooses the gear for just the engine. 20T gear at the differential to 12T under it, to 12 & 16 underneath the gearbox for 20 & 16 selectable on the engine, and then 12T above that for the ERS.

Probably pearl gold? Recolouring it yellow for just this set would be odd.

Actual car has a removable hard top between A and B pillars, the model looks like they might make it easy to do.

Is that a new quarter circle piece on the front, 2x2x2/3, to go with 11477 family of tiles?

Yeah, with the new style pistons they can't offset the banks, otherwise I might try it with the 1/2 thickness perpendicular connectors, with a 1/2 bush between them. I'm not sure what the actual angle is, if it's 45 degrees then #3 connectors would work but maybe not with the shape this is. A new 45 or 67.5 connector would be nice to have. Not sure if 45 overlaps the axles. Or a 6-way one that alternates axles and axle holes.