echos_myron

Thanks, I found the majority of the sails in the LDraw parts library - wow, a lot has been added in the years since I've checked. I'm going to work on importing those into Part Designer and adding connections now.

Oh wow! Yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for; I didn't know such a collection existed. Thank you so much!

It's a huge shame and feels like, despite whatever financial reason they provide, another attempt to even further ratify lego as a premium product for the global north but that's a discussion for another day. I'm sure people will migrate to BrickOwl, but this really throws a wrench into the global LEGO community - why ruin a perfectly good thing by buying it out and gutting it if not to satisfy ulterior motives? I can't help but be pessimistic about the BL buyout between the removal of non-official parts and the locking out of half the world; just LEGO making sure they get a cut of the aftermarket pie. LEGO is nothing without the rest of the world, and Americans (and I am one) seem to have lost all creativity that doesn't relate to media franchises. This of course doesn't stop MOCers in the targeted countries (where LEGO is in many cases already prohibitively expensive) from building or acquiring parts in other ways, but it feels like a deliberate F U to many of the most creative and talented LEGO builders out there, and, though I hope not, seems indicative of an even darker shift in their corporate philosophy.

Thank you! I have been a big fan of yours for years and always found you to be the "adult in the room" here. And of course you are correct - I was specifically trying to think of when beams and pins and axles and the like began creeping into "non-technic" system sets before I (personally) began to run across far more technic part/function prevalence in kids' sets in the mid-late 00s. My first memories of that cross-pollination en masse, outside of pins connecting castles and the like, is Model Team, though that same start-of-MT era (late '80s) is about the beginning of my LEGO awareness, so there's likely more of that going on before then in sets I'm unaware of. I think the beauty of it all is that indeed it is all the same system because of the underlying mathematics, so I don't like drawing the lines too firmly between system and technic (something I'm doing, not you). And is there anything more beautiful than a solid, mathematically sound Technic structure covered in plates and bricks? Maybe, but that's the beauty of being able to build however you like. :)

It can't be coincidental that the outage overlapped with the announcement that they'll stop operating in half the world, can it?

Technic had been integrated with SYSTEM in the pre-dark times "adult" sets (Model Team and then early UCS SW, often for structural integrity reasons and for functions like vehicle steering). There's a huge uptick in its integration into child-targeted SYSTEM in the mid-00s; many sets from City, Fantasy Era, Aqua Raiders, 09 Pirates, basically all the post-dark ages revivals of earlier themes contain heavily integrated Technic features for their play functions. Now with the introduction of the O-clip, 3.18mm strength has improved to the point that you now see bars and clips replacing what Technic was often used for for the past two decades (good riddance, click hinges) as the 3.18 bar and clip system is smaller, more attractive, more easily integrated with studded parts owing to the sheer number of new clip and bar parts from recent years, and so on; that is now what you see holding panels on vehicles, making weird angles, and connecting sections of castles. Panels Technic is its own beast and in my opinion worse off. To me the draw of Technic is knowing it's still LEGO, as Technic is obviously based off the same geometry, but once you lose any need to keep track of the 5/2 rule it just feels like a completely different construction system.

Hello, I suppose this is as good a reason as any to finally sign up for an EB account after close to, what, 20? years of browsing. Is this project still active? I was brought here by @Marooned Marin's excellent and thorough 3D sail creation tutorial (thank you!!) - I've been an avid Studio user since its inception (and LDD before that, MLCad before that, etc...) and have access to Solidworks so it was a dream come true to finally be able to make and import sails. Now that car season is over I've been getting back into building old sets, some of which I still own from childhood, in Studio as accurately as possible. I've gone through several themes already and am beginning my Pirates journey now, which led me here for a solution to the sail issue, and in turn guided me to this project, but I can't access the Dropbox folder to see what's already been built. Since I'll be building as many sets as I can from the 89-96, '09 and '15 lines (except maybe the Armada stuff since many of those parts were still missing last I checked, and unfortunately Islanders for the same reason), I figured I would offer to first build whatever hasn't been finished here yet and contribute to this collaborative effort (though it's annoying how many torso prints still aren't in studio, but I believe the ldraw library still has a bunch of parts that for whatever reason haven't yet made it into Studio, right? and could be imported). This also leads me to a question: Is there anywhere online I can find sail measurements, or "flattened" scans of them so that I can recreate the others in Solidworks using the method Marin posted? My childhood sets are in storage and I don't have several of the ships so I wouldn't be able to measure them anyway. Thanks everyone.