CP5670

My favorite box style is the old 90s Technic one, with the old logo and the blueprints in the background. The current Technic design is nice too, although the internal packaging sucks. The Star Wars UCS models also have great box pictures. If you consider the packaging as well, some specific great boxes from the past that come to mind are: 6990 Monorail Transport System (multi-layered featured parts tray and minifigs prominently set up in the middle) 6392 Airport (parts tray had the plane pieces laid out in the shape of the plane) 8094 Control Center (electronic schematic in background art, styrofoam section to hold the control center, big parts tray) 8448 Super Street Sensation (7 or 8 sub-boxes of various sizes arranged to fit in like a puzzle, and the wheels arranged along the side)

I didn't think much of the change at the time it was announced (which was 2004 by the way, not 2003). Most of my sets were vintage items coming off ebay in those days anyway, and I figured it would take a few years for the supply of gray on Bricklink to run out. Although I did end up skipping a lot of new sets over the next few years that I would have bought immediately otherwise. However, I have become increasingly annoyed by the change as the years have gone by and my own supply of gray (and that of BL stores) has started to run out. I tend to not use much of either color at the moment, except in Technic models where I still have plenty of gray parts. I still don't have enough standard bricks in either the gray or blay to do a whole lot with them in System models, although this will probably change in the future as I accumulate more blay. The actual colors don't really matter to me. It is the difference and lack of consistency that creates a problem. The color change also effectively (and in practice as well) put an end to the Legends concept, as any re-released sets would have to be significantly different from the originals. I think they were actually quite right in that assessment. TLG did in fact announce the change on Lugnet just after production of the new pieces started, but if they had kept completely quiet, I would be willing to bet that most of the AFOL fanbase who complained would not have noticed at all. We have seen (unintentional, and maybe temporary) changes of a similar magnitude with some other colors more recently, and very few people have taken notice of that.

Almost every set will come with a few extra pieces, especially small things like 1x1 round plates or Technic pins. It has been that way for a long time. I never understood why TLG does it, but I'm not complaining. The best ones I've gotten are probably printed 1x1 tiles in a variety of sets (some Futuron and M:Tron sets in the 80s/90s, and more recently in the 7990 Cement Mixer), and some space visors in colors that are hard to come by today.

If in doubt, it's the latter. The only bricks I have that behave the other way are from a few old Technic sets, and only some specific pieces in those. Some examples are the 1x8 plates in the 8839 Supply Ship (only those plates, nothing else), the wheel hubs and transmission cover plate in the 8880 Super Car, and the (non-ABS) white axle joiners in the 8480 Space Shuttle.

I like printing much better in most situations, except for some cases where the base piece is itself rare (in which case it's better to have both options). I expect to see mostly stickers on these new sets though. Printed parts were much more common just four or five years ago, but have become increasingly rare recently.

I left off the last digit. This is the link. It's about old SNES and Mac casings, but they are made of ABS and a lot of it is relevant to Lego as well.

Yeah, if only some sides of the bricks are yellow, it's definitely the UV form of it. The other kind I mentioned occurs uniformly across the entire brick, including any covered parts.

Yes, this is basically the result of oxidation, which is accelerated a lot by UV exposure. The best way to avoid it is to keep your Lego in a somewhat dimly lit room, without direct exposure to sunlight. It's a good idea to cover up any windows in the room, and possibly also to use incandescent lighting. If you can block the sun, that should mostly fix the issue. I have had white models on display for several years without any problems. This mainly affects white bricks, but can also be seen in gray and blue to a lesser extent. Now there are also a few rare pieces that oxidize due to a different cause and will actually get discolored faster in a dark room. I have a few select pieces from some early 90s sets that are like this (some of which are quite rare too ). TLG has confirmed the existence of such bricks too, but I haven't seen this phenomenon in anything from the last several years. The yellowing process can be reversed, although it's not really simple to do. Someone here (Bonaparte I think) managed to do it pretty effectively using some kind of industrial grade bleach and giving it a lot of time. This article has some interesting information on this issue.

I like how the overseas shipping is $2450 on top of the base price.

The translucent white has been around for the last two years, but the gray is new to me. You're the second person to have brought up gray around here. I hope the quality isn't actually getting worse instead of better.

That is interesting. I have had about 10 MISB sets that included these wheels and they all came with the tires pre-attached. I've never actually seen a set where they were originally separated. Do you know what years your sets were made in? The manufacture date is the only discrepancy I can think of, as mine all happen to be from 1990 onward.

I don't think the tires were originally intended to be removed at all, especially since they came pre-attached to the wheels. The 5590 alternate model is one of the very few places where you had to take them off. (on a side note, I never understood what that model was supposed to be )

Many of us love the products, not necessarily the company. Although I certainly agree with you that this issue has been dealt with and dragging out the hostility further wouldn't achieve anything.

Well, at least they had a good run of over 15 years. I wonder what that test is supposed to cover. Those wheels were not known for breaking or any other quality problems (as opposed to some other wheels I can think of). They came with the tires pre-attached though, unlike most other types of wheels, and the tires were hard to remove. I wonder if that had anything to do with it.

I don't actually know much about the indexing aspect of it either. This sort of thing is a basic feature in commercial database software though. In any case, what makes this problem difficult is not really the data storage, but the fact that the solutions have to be integers (you can't buy half a brick or buy from half a store). You may want to look into branch and bound methods, which are the standard way to do this. They basically try to split up the problem into many smaller, continuous linear optimization problems, which are fairly easy to solve. This definitely takes a lot of time and computation, but it's still much less work than working out all possible combinations, which would be totally hopeless in a situation like this.

There have been a few cases of 80s/90s sets where the box picture showed small differences from the actual set, which probably indicates a preliminary version. The 8868 Airtech Claw Rig has a slightly different compressor design shown on the box, using a smaller pulley. I've seen more cases like this, but can't remember any others off the top of my head. The 8454 Rescue Truck was a completely different color in the prerelease shots, green instead of red. They were posted on Lugnet many years ago, but I can't find any pictures on BL now. And yeah, it sucks how some of these prerelease versions were so much better than the final products. That city crane in particular looks miles better than the <insert that tiresome argument> version they settled on.

You don't need to compute anything close to all possible combinations if the data is indexed properly. This is an example of an integer optimization problem, and there are various methods known for solving them. (although you are right that it wouldn't be practical for the server to take such requests on an internet search engine) BL does at least let you search for several parts at once. It won't find optimal combinations of stores but it can give you a list of all the stores that carry them (which is good enough in many cases). Now the funny thing is that I placed several orders last summer and I distinctly remember having it show me the results sorted by price, but I can't figure out how to do this now. I just played around with the wanted list for 10 minutes but the sorting and filtering options seem to be different than what I remember, or I may be doing something wrong. Just goes to show that the procedure is needlessly convoluted though.

Well, you could also ask what is the difference between Brickarms and the clone brands, many of which include minifig accessories that don't exist in Lego. If anyone actually introduces copies of specifically out-of-production Lego parts and sells them individually, I think it's safe to say that they do intend to complement Lego. The only consumers interested in such products would be the Lego builders. Ultimately, the brick quality would be the key deciding factor for me, in terms of strength, rigidity, color level, opacity and so on. I don't have so much of a problem with mixing different brands, but I tend to be very picky about mixing parts of different levels of quality or condition, more than most AFOLs. My views on this have changed to some extent during the last few years, largely due to the decline in Lego's own quality, and I am more open to third party parts (at least in concept) than I once used to be.

Am I the only one who doesn't care about the set names and which one goes with this set? In the old space themes, the names often didn't reflect anything about the set itself and were just randomly chosen to be anything that sounded cool.

Speaking of the gold bricks, I wonder whether those bricks are chrome gold (the electroplated and shiny kind) or metallic gold (crappy kind that looks more like copper ). You can't really tell in the pictures.

I love the reviews, especially the "serious security breach" one.

Well, to each his own. I would rather maximize the amount of time I actually spend building instead of doing things like that.

These are some things I would like to see: 1: Allow stores to list items in other currencies, and update the exchange rates automatically from XE or some similar site. This should put an end to the exchange rate nonsense that has been going on there. The "lowest price first" search is currently useless when dealing with international stores, since you see a lot of apparently cheap entries come to the top when they are actually using bogus exchange rates to drive up the price. 2: Increase the activity period on the shopping cart's browser cookies. I sometimes place large orders (100-150 lots) and it can take me a few hours to go through my collection and determine exactly what I need. If I take a break at the end of the day and resume shopping the next morning, my whole shopping cart is often deleted because the cookie has expired. This can be quite infuriating and I've had it happen several times in the past, although it is avoidable if you watch out for it. I think it already allows this, if I understand you correctly. Copmike told me about it a while ago here. However, it would be nice if you didn't have to fiddle with the wanted list at all (which is designed for a different purpose), and instead simply had a way to search for multiple text entries at once.

Apparently you didn't read the whole sentence. They are supposed to have a brick-built appearance, even though actual bricks will not be used. Of course, these are likely preliminary designs anyway, so things like the color scheme may change by the time the products are available.

Well, I don't see how even kids would like the appearance of those items. If I was a kid, I would want them to look like cool gadgets that the Agents would use, not just a random hodgepodge of colored bricks.