CP5670

This was an okay set for the price, although some other themes had better small sets like 6815 or 6850. I like the fact that it has a windscreen, but there should have been a control panel and a better place to put the gun/megaphone thing. The main reason to get this was the police chief. This set is probably the reason he is still fairly common on BL and ebay, since he only appeared in the Galactic Mediator otherwise.

I never liked that angled Hydronaut cockpit, which is basically all this set is. The rest of the Hydronaut sets all used the same thing. It is possible to put in some controls and still have the minifigs sit upright in it though, despite what the instructions suggest. The Hyronaut minifigs themselves were great. There were three different torsos and they all used that cool chrome helmet with the orange lights. Unfortunately, the larger sets in this theme included too many enemy Stingrays and not enough Hydronauts.

This looks way better than the SP3 sets people have reviewed so far. The SP ship has great looking weapons and it certainly lives up to the set's name with those engines. The alien craft is not as good (too many stickers and no interesting transparent colors), but it's solidly built and doesn't look hollow at all like the earlier sets did. I didn't like it in the preliminary pictures but the design is growing on me now. It should be easy to mod it so that the windows are covered and there is room for the second guy.

One of the old space androids like the Spyrius/Explorien robot would work well, and the chrome would actually make sense on them. That classic space guy looks really nice.

The Max Security Transport looks pretty nice. I don't think the new one is necessarily worse than the preliminary, although I hope the driver can sit upright in it. I like how they're including the prison cells across the theme, just like SP 1 and 2 did.

Is there a danger of Lugnet being shut down? The community has gradually left the place but I was under the impression that the site itself will remain up more or less indefinitely. As you say, it would be a major loss to the community if all the existing posts there disappeared.

Looks nice, although none of them are closer to me than existing stores. Maybe I could stop at the Baltimore store at some point, as I cross through that area when I visit my parents (or go to Brickfair).

This is an interesting topic. Although it would be great if EB takes on Lugnet's role as the premier AFOL discussion hub, I don't think it is quite there yet. EB is fairly popular but the activity is limited to certain categories (as you said, Technic/Mindstorms is still much more popular on Lugnet), but this continues to improve over time. It is actually the least active of the three forums I frequent today, although the others aren't Lego related. I used to post in lugnet.technic regularly many years ago, around 2000-2002. What eventually put me off was the forum interface adapted from a newsgroup setup, which, among other things, made it a big hassle to create posts and prevented you from editing or formatting them. I thought that forum software was outdated back then, and today it has honestly become ancient. Apparently becoming a member eases the posting process to some extent, but I find it absurd to pay fees for basic functionality that any decent forum supports for free these days, and I wonder if the place might have retained its activity if it had transitioned to a proper forum software at some point. A few years ago, I tried getting back into it, but the server was inexplicably rejecting my email address at that point. I eventually registered on EB after glancing over several other forums, as it was reasonably active without having overly strict rules or focusing on one theme only, and I haven't looked back since then. Still, it's a pity that the Lugnet community has shrunk so much, as that used to be the real attraction of the site. Although I hear that the overall "mood" there changed over the years, the Technic community I knew was one of the friendliest groups I've seen on the internet, and I had a lot of interesting discussions with them. I continue to go over there occasionally to search for old information, although I don't post anymore.

I guess you don't build Technic models. I use that piece all the time to get a half-stud distance between two gears, as done on 8466, 8480 and numerous other sets.

The NXT system is actually different from Power Functions.

I like the classic space guys, but there have been quite a few of them now and none are fully authentic (all have wrong helmets and some have misplaced printing). I would rather see some of the later, space faction minifigs at this point. As far as I know, there hasn't been any corrected version of volume 2, and it's been out for a while now. It's strange that they made such an obvious error in the first place, especially since the first one had it right like you said.

The main issue I have is with their depth. They jut out of the chassis significantly and effectively make the car 6-wide. This looks fine for trucks as a substitute for doubled wheels, but it's rather odd for a car. The large tire width (compared to the hub) is also more in line with off-road wheels and not something you would expect to see on a sports car. Those wheels were used in the town junior sets in the late 90s (which were so bad that you couldn't even tell whether they were cars or trucks ), but I don't remember seeing any other 90s car with those wheels. They were used on trucks and SUVs. As for the roadside phone booths, it's sometimes cheaper to just leave them there instead of removing them, but cell phones are ubiquitous these days and have made them obsolete in many countries.

This car is okay, but it suffers from the same issue as several other cars in the last few years: those wheels are meant for trucks and look too big here. The smaller racing slicks would have looked better. The tree and phone booth are cool additions. The emergency phone booth is interesting for such a recent set though, as those are increasingly being phased out in real life these days.

Because it's a spam bot.

If you're only waiting on the transformer, I doubt you actually need the official Lego one (which is overpriced anyway). Anything with a 10V output and the same size connector will work.

The Diplomat is great. It's good to see other people building ships in the classic colors and styles. As with your last model, the conference room is especially well designed. I wonder what evil plans they're discussing in there. The escort ships are a little odd though. The shape is interesting, but they look like they're made for hovering along the ground rather than as spacecraft. Adding trans-blue octagon canopies around the cockpits may give them a more space-like appearance.

See this thread. The biggest factors seem to be higher taxes and less competition from other toys, although there are other aspects to it as well. That doesn't make any sense.

I'm not sure if I will get this set. It looks pretty nice, but the big tow truck in the Garage set is a lot better. On the other hand, the rest of that set is pretty underwhelming, so this might still be a better buy overall. I like 4-wide for cars, but 6-wide definitely looks better for trucks like this one. Although I think they should make better use of the 6-wide design in the cab. A dashboard like this would be a very good addition.

It's trivial to do that on your own. I downsize my pictures in a particular way that I think produces better looking results than what most programs do by default.

Ouch, that sounds really bad. And the bus is the main attraction of the set too. Are the bad parts common or more specialized things? (I'm hoping it's the latter) I thought they were starting to getting it right, as the 8259 Mini Bulldozers I got recently mostly had nice looking yellow parts (except for the 1x4 panels, a less common part), although the Beach House largely contained the junk yellow. I figured that was because it was an older set and packed a longer time ago. Red does seem to have improved lately, although white is still inconsistent. At least white minifig torsos look a lot better than they did last year.

At last, it's nice to see some detailed shots of the Galactic Enforcer. I see a robot sitting behind the pilot, and the rear crew section looks packed with computers and weapons. I also noticed that the trans-blue half-cylinders used for the prisons are different and taller than the existing ones. It actually looks more useful than the existing piece due to the square cutout. I would say the jails are better than the SP2 ones, but not nearly as good as the SP1 space lockups.

I do agree with you on that issue. Since 2003, TLG has more or less removed studded parts from Technic sets completely, which I think has been a bad development for several reasons. The good thing is that studded Technic beams and plates are very common in other themes these days, so it's easy to buy them from Bricklink for MOCs. The modern sets are actually comparable to the 90s sets (and better than the 80s ones) in terms of mechanical sophistication, but the studless construction gives them a quite different feel to build. I find the builds unintuitive and less like Lego, although the functionality remains great and I continue to buy any standout Technic sets TLG releases.

Brickshelf is an easy choice for me. I'll quote myself from another thread on this recently:

This kind of thing annoys me too, but it might not be a problem six months from now. What is happening here is that TLG had unintentionally moved to smooth slopes when they outsourced production in 2007, but they have been transitioning back to rough slopes this year. They stopped produced the smooth ones last year but still have stockpiles of them left, especially less common slopes like 2x4 and 2x8 ones, so we're going to keep seeing them in sets until they run out of them.

That was my impression too. In any case, it would have to be a fairly heavy load that could actually benefit from such high pressures. I hooked up this compressor to various official Technic models and the pistons on all of them move very fast beyond 30 psi (making movements jerky), even the ones on the 8421 crane boom or 8868 turntable. It's interesting that the nozzles are actually a significant bottleneck in practice. I probably wouldn't mess with mine though for fear of damaging them.