Faefrost

Punch it in as the country you purchased it in. Not your country of residence. That should get you into the system and let you leave any needed notes etc.

I use LDD, at least for the core of things. Then go back as I am building and refine it in the brick. (As an example my LDD staircases never line up right so I mostly just free build them.) here are a few tricks I find help. 1. Create template files for the basic modular footprints. 32x32 corner, 32x32 straight, 16x32 straight etc. include basic sidewalks and the common connection points. These save a great deal of time and setup for future projects. 2. When working on a modular project I normally keep several active files of it. One for each floor, so they are each standalone. One of the full combined building, and one or two with critical sub builds such as furniture, details etc. 3. I highly recommend using LDD in a mode that validates part and color. It saves a ton of aggravating cleanup later. 4. Try not to just randomly use parts from LDD. Have some idea what you are using, otherwise you can get a huge surprise when you discover you have just based your model around an exceptionally rare and obscenely expensive part. Be flexible about part use unless you actually own the must use part already. 5. Don't forget to put glass in the windows.

Things like the Wargs, Eagles and cows probably fall into the same category as BigFigs, and are probably mainly made in China. The only exceptions being the common system set animals like horses and dogs.

He brought down a Venator through infiltration and nearly killed Mace Windu in the process.

Would you prefer the version where everyone is sitting around on couches doing nothing? Or the version where they are massacring all the children?

Oh dear lord, the fake list of sets is back again? What next? The fake CS letters saying LotR is/is not coming back?

I would guess that the product is kept visible even when sold out, if Lego still has a certain number available somewhere in the channel. Ie enough pieces still on brand store shelves that may return to the central warehouse. So there may be a possibility that some may pop up briefly here and there. They probably do not pull the listing until the set reaches its formal EOL date.

Retailers do not plan stock for the holiday season until much later in the year. So they would be expecting a catalog update mid to late summer for the stuff available in the third quarter for Christmas or Holiday sales surge. The retail calender year is not the same as ours.

It probably got scooped up by a small number of cagey speculators who are then dumping it on ebay and similar sites. Cop Mike, actually that little bit of info you got back does give some ideas as to why it might not have been produced globally. Nothing definitive, but it is doubtful the community reps would ever really know the answer. - "Regional Buy In", we tend to think of TLG as a single entity with all decisions coming from Billund. This is I'm sure not 100% correct. They are a global company, which typically means that each sales region operates semi autonomously. Billund decides what to make and sell. The Region's determine how much of what will sell in their area and at what prices. (This is why the pricing in US, Europe and Australia are ultimately completely unrelated. The prices are set by different business entities. Billund just gives final approvals for regional actions.) In the case of this set they may have had high interest from the East Asian Region and no interest whatsoever from North America or Europe. As it result they may have opted to do a short limited run for the East Asian region only. - Like CuuSoo this was designed to be some sort of special limited run to begin with. That plus the lack of western sales region interest probably triggered the very small region specific run that we got. They were planning on a small 10-20k run. Asia had high interest and wanted at least 10k. NA and EU looked at it and wanted at best minimal orders, so they just focused it on Asia.

So far as we know regular bricks are not made in China yet. That's what they are building a TLG owned factory for. The Chinese factories are generally used for specialty stuff. Blind bagged or promotional packaged minifigs (possibly some others such as Chima). Big figs. Very specialized head molds. And very very unusual specialized parts. Often stuff that comes individually bagged.

I think the only classic ship we have some indication of it making a return for Ep VII is the Millenium Falcon. And then just because the British studio is building a full sized mock up. (It's not 100% certain if this is for the movie! for tourists or both.) past that is any bodies guess.

They are both sets. The first is http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=7672-1 7672 The Rogue Shadow from the Force Unleashed Video Game. It came with 3 Minifigs. A battle damaged Darth Vader, Galen Malek and Juno Eclipse. The second is http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=8019-1 8019Republic Attack Shuttle from The Clone Wars cartoon.

Yes and no, once again. I don't think we have seen any reports on cracked bricks. If you were to line up the old parts with similar new ones they all probably withstand time and forces about the same. The problem is more newer part geometries. Ie single stud gripping slopes. Which have a whole different degree of forces than older parts. Don't forget there are plenty of old parts that were prone to crack or break. Clips, old style finger hinges, etc. wherever we saw parts discontinued and redesigned there was probably some unwanted stress there. You do realize that by its nature, plastic will eventually deteriorate? (Granted so will wood, and most metals when exposed to air.)

They said within the next few weeks. So I would speculat probably any time between now and the end of February.

While we only got 1 really new accessory in the Movie CMF's (the white coffee cup) they sort of countered it with an above average number of new hairpieces and similar. I think only 4 figs don't have some new part (although some new parts are shared with TLM sets).

If the seller is including shipping in that price, then that is still a great deal for some overseas locations.

Would this be a good time to point out that we should never get too worked up over images this preliminary? Right now the pic shows 3 unknown squid wards. There is a good chance that will get trimmed to two by the time it reaches production. We have seen it happen plenty of times before.

To be fair, we have only ever gotten Yoda in an OT set once. 4502, and that was 10 years ago. So if he only gets OT sets he might have missed him. All the other Yoda Minifigs come from PT or TCW sets. (Granted there is no difference between the old PT and OT Yodas.) While I agree we need a Bail Organa set, I'm thinking TLG might choose to avoid the set where Bail runs screaming while a 10 year old gets slaughtered protecting him. Just saying it might not market well to their target audience. (Or it might disturbingly market too well, which could be worse.) Now for Bail, maybe a remake of the Tantive IV in its episode 3 blue livery? That would look distinct and awesome on display.

I think the most common problem surrounds cheese slopes and other newer similar sloped parts. Further it seems most prone in certain specific colors. With white, yellow and certain intermediary blends of them being most pronounced. Finally it seems erratic. Some people do not see it ever. But others will find it happening a lot. Working, but probably likely hypothesis; it is a combination of three things. Part geometry and stresses, color chemistry, and environment, most likely temperature variances. The biggest issue is most likely with the geometry of the cheese slope part itself. Anachir pointed out some of the stresses above. But in the case of a cheese slope it is further exacerbated because by nature of the part the forces are not evenly distributed. A 1x1 plate, tile or round, while gripping a stud with high clutch, still have an even amount of reinforcement all the way around. The very nature and shape of the cheese slope means the uphill side is more reinforced than the down hill side, and the slope sides will have uneven force across them. Now this is not in and of itself a huge problem. The parts obviously work, and they are wildly popular for doing things no other parts can. So the uneven force is a bit of a design trade off. The part geometry probably does not become a huge issue until the parts get put under pressure and then subjected to an environmental force, probably heating and cooling over time. Just enough to cause some flex and added stress. This may be exacerbated in situations where unlike plastics are joining, such as ABS cheese slopes on a vacu form styrene baseplate. Or attached to polycarbonate. (Or it may be worse ABS to ABS, I'm just wildly speculating here.) Finally color. We often forget that in plastics color = chemistry! and chemistry = strength and properties of the plastic. So different colors of the same type of plastic may behave somewhat differently. A white or a red may be more brittle than a green, which may feel different or seem softer than a blue, etc. so different colors of the same part may handle stress differently. This is one of the reasons why we do not see every part in every color. TLG has to do a lot of testing. It's also one of the key reasons that some clone brands are so horrid. They don't do anywhere near the degree of needed testing on color properties. A combination of all 3 of these is probably what brings some light colored cheese slopes to form cracks under stress. Is it a "quality issue" ? Yes and no. Remember the cheese slope is a fairly new part. In this regard it isn't all that different from the old school space helmets and clips. I'm sure Lego is working to reduce or eliminate the issue in future revisions of the part. In the meantime does anyone here want to give up cheese slopes until they do? Show of hands? As far as color variations, such as yellows and blues not being as consistent. That's I'm sure the unfortunate downside to improving production technologies. In the old days Lego used pre colored plastic pellets from Bayer. Very consistent color, but much more complicated production, more limited color pallets, etc. these days they use a newer color injection system. They use a single neutral color plastic pellet, and the color is injected into the molten plastic during the Lego production process. It probably isn't quite as perfectly precise as the old pre colored pellets. But it offers so many production benefits that it is generally a worthwhile trade off. Notice how we see more colors per set these days? And lots more use of subtler colors. This is why. They can make part A in color B as needed. They don't have to setup huge vast batches of red or blue etc to the extent they used to. This means the designers are no longer limited to whatever color they have huge vats of in the warehouse, and instead can be more creative and flexible in color use in their designs as well. Sometimes advancing technology has a few trade offs. Perfect color consistency down to the level beyond human perception is one of the trade offs.

Game pre order bonuses are rarely all that obscure. They may be an obscure variant of a well known character, but they generally like a well known and recognizable character to help drive game sales. So a Mithril shirt Bilbo would be a likely option type of bonus. A Thrain or Thror not so much. Lego store and S@H sale bonus figs will get a little more unusual. Think of it this way. It's ultimately marketing drones who decide what is the promo item. The folks at DK are normally fairly familiar with the subjects they are putting books out for. So they will often go with more unusual figure choices. The Lego folks who decide the store giveaways are extremely familiar with the subjects, hence things like alt Hoth Han and Jor El. The folks doing the marketing bonuses for the stores like GameStop or Walmart not so much. So the character will almost always be a form of a character readily familiar to them. Hence Elrond, Iron Patriot and Lex Luthor etc. ideally in their eyes it will often be a character that appears on the game box cover.

A better way to look at it is they will almost never make a new mold exclusively for a D2C set, or without having a clear more general release planned purpose for the parts. Case in point the new Simpsons House. Which have a ton if new molds. But which is buffered by the Simpsons CMF line. I believe the only exceptions to this rule are very very rarely large technic sets (which I guess technically aren't D2C as they also see TRU shelf release) and some specialized train parts. (Which is a small but exceptionally stable long term niche. Almost it's own hobby). If we were to see a D2C Gondor set it would be pretty well guaranteed that we would not see unique new specialized Gondorian helmets. We would get some creative re use of an existing mold. Be it castle, LotR or something else. Honestly at this late stage I would be surprised to see a large number of new molds in either Middle Earth line, unless we had some indication that they were planning on renewing or extending the license. I suspect we got the Rohan helms in large part because the shaping / tooling on them is not really all that license specific. Without printing they are pretty generic helms that can be reused in other lines. Gondor helms might be trickier that way. (Heck we didn't see classic Stormtrooper helms in Star Wars until 3 years in, when they had decided to renew the short term license for the first long term one.)

Actually yes. There is a new system scale Snowspeeder in the Summer wave release. You may also be able to still find the Battle for Hoth set http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=75014-1 still on some store shelves which has the current version of it in it. They seem to keep an ever slowly evolving version of this size Snowspeeder pretty consistently out there every two or three years. This summer will also have a new ATAT to go along with it. Sadly no signs of a new version of the UCS scale one on the horizon.

I sort of doubt that the higher ups would allow a time traveller as a component of AoS, simply because of the Avengers franchise. They would probably want to keep the door open for Kang the Conqueror after phase 3. And his whole Schlick is Time Travel.

In theory we should be seeing a little bit of Black Widow's back story in Winter Soldier.

Are you hinging it to swing open dollhouse like? I'm having trouble visualizing what you are doing? And by reasonably flush, are you trying to get the sides to lock in straight, or eliminate those slight bulges from the hinge itself?