MAB

It depends what you mean by recyclable. You can melt and recast ABS if you sort it very well. It should not contain other plastics, dirt, metal, paper, stickers and of course the colour will be a dirty dark colour due to mixed colours. It is probably not financially viable to sort for recasting.

Right, but I was talking about a Castle set, rather than a castle that happens to come as part of a license that probably won't please Castle fans.

Indeed. It will also have a similar lifetime. Often when people see reports that LEGO is trying to move towards sustainable sources and bio-plastics they complain that they want their LEGO to last and not decompose, completely missing this point. When it comes to parts they are going to the source to make it greener but not the end product. Whereas when it comes to (single use) packaging, they are getting rid of plastic in favour of paper and so they are thinking about the end of life but not so much about the source.

It has been on the missing parts section for years. Maybe they did an update and were sloppy when cutting and pasting code.

Well they started as wood so there was a fairly big change when moving to the first plastic parts. There have no doubt been many changes of plastic too. Hands, for example, are different to most other parts, and obviously the softer parts are more rubberised. We think of lego being made from ABS, but that isn't a single formulation, and it is likely that different sources have slightly different compositions.

It wouldn't be little, it would need to be large. Otherwise you'd need loads of them, or the baseplates would sag if too many gaps.

I don't think the $250000 was for the mould but the full costs of designing the piece, including testing many different materials and getting the shape right. It may be that they use cheaper moulds for CMF accessory parts. Tolerance for minifigure parts does not need to be as good as for building parts. It doesn't matter if an accessory is slightly out, so long as it can be held, or fits on a a head, or whatever it needs to do, it is fine. Whereas a brick has to be perfect width, length, height, stud sizes, etc or it will be noticed. There was a problem with the CMF Princess headgear, as many had very weak clutch.

I look at the Disney Castle, and I see Disney rather than a castle. It is partly the same with HP, I see bricks for making old buildings with minifigures I'd need to sell off, but not a castle. For me, there is more of an overlap between Star Wars and castles, simply because I tend to build in greys when I build castles. Same here. In fact, I hope no castles make it through IDEAS. I'd prefer LEGO to just do their own if they are going to do one, rather than accept one of many through IDEAS.

The UK price (RRP) is £17.99, which converts as $25 USD and over $32 AUD! No wonder most stores except LEGO themselves slashed them to about £12 on release.

From the opening post ... If you are intending to collect these hard-to-find minifigures through the touch and feel method, I could not advise you doing so. This method will not work well since the only easiest minifigure to identify could be Coach Joachim Löw since he is the only minifigure without a football in it. It is practically impossible and is best to just buy the whole series through opened packets or a mint box. If you want to sort them, open them.

Yeah, thanks, I'd seen the new sets images but haven't had a chance to look closely at them all yet.

Maybe that is LEGO's reasoning for not doing sci-fi space ranges so often these days, with the assumption that kids want something new and don't want spaceships that look like the ones their parents and grandparents would have known in their childhoods. Although it could also be why kids of AFOLs might want modern tech toys more than they want to play with LEGO.

The other big question is would they just do it themselves then and forget any IDEAS submissions. It would seem silly to approve an IDEAS castle if they then redesign it into another castle. They have the feedback from past themes for the anniversary set, they have the sales data for The Blacksmith and (soon will have) data for the Creator Castle. It is not like "do a castle" is an original idea.

For modern road plates, yes. However, baseplates ending (in other themes) is an issue for historic builders. The thread is about the impact of other themes, and that is not necessarily only new parts coming but also parts being discontinued, and their effect on historic builds. Personally, I'd like to see the new road plates coming in tan and dark tan and maybe even green, although the existing ones are a good start. These could be useful for town squares and similar where a flat rather than studded surface is wanted. I prefer regular 16x16 plates for this as they are more customizable, although the number / colour range of these appearing seems to be dropping off too, although this year is a good year for DBG and LBG 16x16 plates.

If something is coming up multiple times, I'd hope they would go further in review with one submission from the multiple ideas on that theme that looks like a set. Not just a collection of figures with a basic build and not a massively over engineered and huge part count submission, but something where the designer has considered what it is meant to be - a retail set.

Nice. What are the half and half fleshie legs used for the Gauls?

Given how many castles get rejected I doubt we'll see a castle come through IDEAS. If LEGO want to make an 18+ Castle, they will make one without needing IDEAS. We might see another Blacksmith style associated set in a few years, but I cannot see a full castle coming that way. As to needing more IP based IDEAS to get a castle, we already have Harry Potter with its good sales to a large fanbase. I don't know what the fanbase of Willow is, but given its age and lack of modern revivals presumably it is way smaller than HP, Tron, Wall-E, The Big Bang Theory, Friends, Seinfeld, The Flintstones, The Office, ...

Same here. At least half the current round could be crossed off without any serious thought because of being too similar to other sets or a bad fit or just not looking like a good set.

What would the rule be? If they have to be updated, what does that mean? One part, ten parts, 50% or more ... Changing rules so less get to review has the same effect though.

It is simple to construct corners with the modern road system. So they don't have to drive only in a straight line. And that works fine for grid based cities. Of course there are no smooth curves (at least yet). And even with curved road baseplates, the curves were all 90 degrees to fit into a square based system so it is not that big a change. Although do kids really care about roads anyway? My kids tend to prefer buildings, then just move cars around the buildings pretending where roads are (or drawing them on the back of wallpaper on the floor). And in that sense, I'd prefer they separated the new road system from building sets like the old road plates used to be separate.

I guess what really matters here is do LEGO care how many get through. This time will (financially) cost them about $25K in sets at full RRP. I don't know what that corresponds to in real value, but the actual cost is clearly less than that to them. And what is generates is a lot of discussion about IDEAS and about LEGO. Is the $5K or $10K or whatever the real cost of the prizes is to them worth more than the advertising they get from the IDEAS scheme having so many possibles getting through. As to the cost in terms of time in review. I reckon at least half get scrubbed out instantly. I think most of us could go down that list and cross out at least half with little thought. Then with 10 minutes thought in total scrub out half of the remaining ones. So I doubt if the length of the list is that onerous on the review panel. Popular IDEAS (especially the IP driven ones) will still get there, just slightly slower. I don't see how they can enforce that, given two different people can submit the same or a similar idea. If an idea is rejected, it could just be resubmitted by someone else. So stopping resubmissions would be pointless. I think this is a good idea. It makes people think about what their best idea is, rather than submit many similar ideas hoping some will make it. It will also stop people trying to make a "career" out of mass producing ideas. Or limit the number of prizes to 1. If you have previously won the $500 sets, then you don't win again for subsequent 10K projects. I don't think this is an issue. Better to have them together and cross out one of them instantly, than to have them spread over multiple reviews. Yes, it would reduce the number. Or let a person have, for example, 10 votes per week. I guess the issue is, as noted above, is it really a problem for them? Do they want to limit the number or do they like having such a large number getting there for the benefits it brings them. What they don't want to do is introduce some new rules that affect one type of submission negatively and for people to start talking negatively about IDEAS and LEGO in general. For example, if they make a change that you must get to 25K votes, and this affects non-IP projects more than IP based ones, then people will complain that LEGO have done it in favour of IP based projects.

The point is that that helmet has been around for quite a while already and nothing new.

I think it tells us that lots of people vote now. I somehow doubt sales would be great though, if they made 50 or even just 10 ideas sets per review period. Especially if that meant they had to remove other themes due to production capacity. There are some great MOCs on ideas, some great creativity. But in many cases that is where they ought to stay, as MOCs.

And, for army builders, in CMF series 19.

Sure they still work. But if LEGO thinks something else works better, then they will change and things may disappear. I remember as a kid that these were common baseplates for many of my builds They didn't warp anything like the thin baseplates of similar sizes and they could also be used within a build for upper floors unlike thin baseplates but they still eventually got phased out. I see the new base styles as the recently discovered descendants of these.