MAB

The good news for you is that LEGO produces many more unlicensed sets than it did 30-40 years ago. I think it is great that LEGO caters for a much larger audience than it used to. Plus, if LEGO didn't do licenses, I imagine they wouldn't exist now (maybe a bit extreme) or would be a minor brick building company (more likely), far behind the companies that decided to go with licensed products as part of their portfolio. Creator sounds like a great range for your tastes.

Because card is much easier to recycle than the foil packs, and likely to hold up better than paper bags.

If a once fan of LEGO gets into Elvis or The Rolling Stones and these sets stop them entering dark ages or bring them out, then it is clever marketing.

It is usually used to refer to the technique rather than to describe a set. Even if a set has some sideways building, the term would not really be applied to the set as a whole.

I'd buy a minifig of Tom Baker and maybe a K-9 if it is a reasonable molded piece and not brick built.

Probably, but they are not really any different to cloth, foil or other types of string. All are "legal" purist parts.

It's not worth it for the amount I do.

With SNOT builds you can have studs on the top and sides. And even on the bottom if you want. Whereas even if you have all studs up, you can still have a perfectly smooth, studless finish. To me, SNOT is about building in multiple directions rather than aiming for no exposed studs, as there are often far easier ways to achieve that.

Do you have proof that LEGO copied from this IDEAS submission, and that it is not just coincidence that they were developing their own Concorde design.

Children. Always getting it wrong and ruining adult play. :-)

What is this spirit of LEGO that SNOT does not follow? To me, connecting parts together using studs and antistuds is the spirit of LEGO.

Shoelaces are just thick and flat versions of LEGO string that could have been LEGO and now are.

Now there is only one unlicensed set a year, and only 12 characters, I much prefer mixtures. A couple of space, a couple of historical, a couple of city style, a couple of animals, ... there is a little bit for everyone rather than a whole series for a minority.

The first is obvious but where is the second?

They don't appear in retailer catalogues, if that is where the leaked set numbers have come from.

We have already seen individual figures related to those three at least twice each.

It is not that they cannot come up with other characters but that they'd pick the main characters again.

Looking at The Simpsons, Harry Potter, DC, Marvel, .... if we ever got a Lord of the Rings CMF series then I imagine we'd get Frodo, Sam, Merry, Pippin, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Boromir and Gandalf, Saruman, an Uruk and an Orc, all in similar outfits to the originals and the repeated versions from Rivendell. And I'd not buy any of them.

I'd prefer battle packs to a CMF series, if only because battle packs tend to be a little more generic whereas CMF tend to be specific characters. Although of course battle packs only work if they have other sets in the same theme, so we'd need more sets, probably smaller ones to use battle packs alongside.

Not me.

It could also mean they have an empty space in the roster!

If they do, I hope they also repeat plenty of colours again. Red, black, white, yellow, blue, green, etc. If they want them to sell to wider collectors and kids, they can't just focus on new colours for existing CS minifig collectors. It would also be interesting if they named them or gave them bios and so revealed official job descriptions.

I guess they don't include it as their argument is that this pattern occurred after the results of that poll. There have also been promos that are tangential to past themes such as Town, where they fit with modern City or Modulars and completely irrelevant promos such as houses of the world and botanicals. Others should also have been ticked off. Classical Castle, Black Falcons, Imperials. Personally, I cannot see a pattern. I just see LEGO selling stuff they think will sell. The original list contained a lot of nostalgia because that was the point of it, and they know nostalgia sells. If the poll hadn't have been done, I doubt the themes of the sets recently released would really have been very different.

The hair wires are also difficult to solder, as unskilled people like me tend to have the soldering iron too hot and the thin wires melt. I tend instead to wrap them around contacts, then cover the lot in hot glue to act as both a fixer and as insulation.

It is a shame they are using such thick wires. You can get very fine, almost hair thin, wires that are perfectly suitable for the low currents needed for LEDs. They are so thin, you can run them between bricks and you don't even notice they are there.