Phoxtane

Presumably there's some sort of timer that goes off after ten minutes inside the electronics that control the locomotive that shuts off the motor. You'd have to crack it open and have access to soldering tools and whatnot, but you could use the same method as detailed in this Hackaday article ( http://hackaday.com/2015/03/16/beating-drm-to-extend-the-life-of-an-anti-ageing-therapy-light-mask/ ), where the microcontroller is tricked into never shutting off the motor.

To avoid batteries exploding while charging, be sure to use the charger that came with them - it may not charge as fast, but what you could do is have another set of batteries that charge while the first is being used and swap them out when depleted. After all, the charger that comes with those batteries is designed to be used with them. Lithium-ion batteries in particular are extremely nasty if you treat them wrong:

Oops indeed. On a side note, would you mind talking about that bridge? In my experience, pieces don't bend like that unless something awful has been done to them.

You know, they say that college students these days have more disposable income than ever before? I really don't feel like that is the case, at least for me. Throw me into the 'has no money' hat, and on top of that I'm saving up for next semester's classes, the class I want to take this summer, and a Printrbot Simple Metal 3D printer kit - so at this point I'm breaking down all the sets I have built for parts. I don't do display stuff all that much unless it's something I built, so having this influx of new parts periodically helps a lot.

Good comments from everyone - since spring break starts next week, and I'll be stuck watching the house, I think I'll have time to work on this, if sorting pieces doesn't kill me first. I keep coming back to this thread by Commander Wolf ( http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=106654 ) and I think I'll have to steal the ideas laid out there. Building the base out of plates entirely would allow me to sandwich those half-width beams in between a layer of plates, and will allow me to mount a large battery box. This should also give me the space I want to install a couple of motors. And, I'll make good use of jumper plates. It'll take some cleverness to get the angles and things right if I want to do anything 'off-grid'. One could say that I'll use quite a few jumper plates, perhaps even

I feel like making the move to 7-wide will help with the creative rut I'm in regarding trains. It should in theory allow me to fit more inside a train engine, which'll give me space to insert things like L-motors and PF battery boxes without the compromises that have to be made in 6-wide. Does anyone have basic tips or tricks to use when making the transition? I know that train weight will go up, but pulling power/speed should go up accordingly as well, and that I'll need to build bigger and with more pieces... However, I feel like I'm missing more to the puzzle of 7-wide than that. For example, how would I go about making the train baseplates and centering the bogies within those? Any help with this would be appreciated. As it is, I'm only at the house once a week for an evening (thanks college) and I don't have hardly any time to build anyway, but I figure that LDD will help scratch that itch as well.

Rather than pay all that money, why not Bricklink an opposite-handed version of the set? Just build everything mirrored along the train's long axis - this way you can use the cheap door.

You could probably use one of the Hero Factory or Bionicle masks for the front of the ship as well, giving you a scale to build the rest of the airship to.

I'm pretty sure I have a non-production part, now that I think of it: I'm not sure how rare/common it is, or even if it is a non-production part. I got it at a LUG parts swap, and I trust the judgement of the person who I got it from though!

I'm trying to get a 'basic' look out of a model so that I may take renders from various angles and Photoshop them together. I'd like to get something that resembles the look of this image: Evidently this style is known as an occlusion rendering. I have already colored the model a light gray, but I'd like to completely remove the 'shinyness' of the bricks, as that doesn't lead to results similar to the example shown. If I had to give an idea of what it'd look like, I'd say it's like damp clay - evenly colored, but not reflective or shiny by any means.

You know, I bet there's a reason why they did all those parts in transparent colors. I recall seeing a method of determining stresses distributed within a plastic object - the plastic object must be transparent, and the light being allowed to shine on the object must be polarized in some way. The example light source used in this case was the light coming from a typical computer monitor, with the stresses showing up as a distribution of rainbow patterns. I went ahead and recreated that here with my computer monitor and a plastic drawer from those things that you put screws in - you can see the ripples quite well, but the rainbow effect is lost. It tends to work better the shinier the surface of the plastic, it would seem. As for why this is relevant: in theory one could see the stresses distributed throughout a particular element provided it's molded in a transparent color, which could be useful to match up with simulations or even to see how the part performed during the molding process before in-house simulations were feasible!

There's a collision error between these two parts, whose names/part numbers I am having trouble remembering: I've included both images to help highlight the parts in question!

On the other hand, death is inevitable, and the sooner kids understand that, the better, right?

I don't agree with the rules over how both the original creator and the person who found it get a portion of the royalties. I guess it's considered a near-literal 'finder's fee'? Either way, if I'm consenting to have my model be sold, I'd like the proceeds... I did all the work of making the model, didn't I? This whole thing gets a lot more complicated if the person who submitted it happened to be underage!

Apart from violence, I doubt Lego will go for MGS anytime soon - after all, do you *really* want a naked Raiden minifigure to cartwheel down a hallway with swords in hand?

Yes. Raytracing-based methods of rendering are horrendously CPU-intensive and as such the entire process's time depends entirely on your processor speed and the amount of processor cores available to do the work. If I'm understanding the article correctly, raytracing involves calculating the path of light through each pixel in an image and simulating the results when it collides/refracts/diffuses/whatever - and the bigger the image, the more pixels. Transparent parts, I've found, are awful for this because of all the ways that light interacts with them!

With a generous application of this stuff, you could turn the tread links into something suitable for the bottom of a boat. Or am I thinking of Flex-Seal?

I picked up a set of those drawers that you see in people's garage's for screws and various fasteners. Got mine from Ace Hardware - not sure why everybody insists on Akro-Mils when these do the job perfectly. I don't know if others have this, but it's got holes in the back that you can use to attach it to your walls with!

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling it?

How about proper multi-core support? I'd also like more attention paid to how parts line up based on their position to each other; I've got a small building where the wall panels don't actually attach at one end because the little offsets that have accumulated through building the wall in a circular fashion cause the last panel to not want to connect to the first!

The only acceptable follow-up question is of course 'And what's the deal with airline food anyway?'. You keep hearing about how Peeron is a great resource... and it's not, because I can't find a good portion of the sets I have! It may have been in the past though.

I don't think I've seen Lego pieces this shiny unless they were purposely polished to get a glossy surface. How would I go about changing how glossy the surface is for pieces in general? I just want to dull up non-transparent pieces a bit and maybe just a tad for transparent pieces. See the upper left dark red pieces and the ones on the upper right (next to the 2-wide cheese slopes in both cases) for my problem pieces.

Given that it didn't find any solutions to the five-store problem either I'm going to take out some of the parts from my list - get them from my LUG, most likely - and try again.

Well, it finds more than a few matches with three-store combinations if I let it check all regions. However, since I'd rather not pay for international shipping, I'm going to let it go through only North America. So far it hasn't found any 3- or 4-store combinations... Oh well!

How does Brickficiency determine how many different combinations there are to go through? I had a brief talk with somebody who's taken a lot more math classes than I, and he said they covered this sort of thing in his combinatorials class; he cited a formula (n!)/((n-x)!n!) where n is the amount of things to choose from and x is the amount of items in a give combination... so if I was looking at the amount of 3-store combinations out of 70 stores, it'd be (70!)/((70-3)!3!) - 54,740 different combinations. My TI-84 refuses to do even that by citing an overflow error, so it makes sense that 3-store combinations goes through a few million combinations whereas 4-store combinations gets out of hand very quickly. I was running a 54-part list ranging in quantities from 1 to about 350, and while it went through 3-store combinations in about a minute and a half, it was still churning through 4-store combinations about four hours later - it had gone through 2.4 billion combinations at that point. Is there any point to letting it run as long as it takes to go through all the 5-store combinations to see if it's any cheaper? Or is there generally no benefit, in your experience?