Ralph_S

I don't think that being 'green' has anything to do with this. I have a thing for building politically incorrect pickup trucks, even if I wouldn't want to be found dead in one and can't understand any practical reasons for having them if you're not a farmer or building contractor. So, what I build with LEGO and what I would prefer in real life are separate issues. LEGO building racecars and big trucks is not a statement about the environment. As for LEGO cars, I too think that many of the vehicles in the Speed Racers and Agents line are much too big for minifigs, as was the Scuderia Ferrari truck. It's obvious why this is. In order to make the speed racers and the Ferrari truck look sufficiently like the vehicles in the movie /in real life and in order to fit minifigs inside, they simply have to be big. A second reason is playability. From the pictures that I've seen of the Agents truck, there's some sort of laboratory inside. If you want to be able to play with minifgures inside that, it'll have to be big. For me personally, looking at sets as little more than parts packs, bigger is better. For my own minifig scale vehicles I use roughly the following widths: small cars: 4 wide regular cars: 5 wide trucks: 7 wide (the same as many city trucks in the current LEGO line-up) With a little trouble you can still fit a figure inside and they don't look overly big with a figure standing next to it. Cheers, Ralph

They do, at least online pick a brick does. There these parts are called 'Mini wig man' and 'Mini wig girl', respectively, at least in the English version. Anyway, I was just describing these things in a way that was most likely to mean something to most people -I'm not making a statement about what I personally consider appropriate hair styles for men or women Next time I'll add a disclaimer. Cheers, Ralph

No offense, but presumably you don't have pigtails. I had that part in black and red. Then somewhere in the eighties thiscame out, in black and brown. It wouldn't look too bad on a male minifigure, but it's called "Minifig, Headgear Hair Female" on bricklink. Its male counterpart, not surprisingly called "Minifig, Headgear Hair Male" initially was available only in brown and a few years later in black. Those were pretty much the only options until the nineties. In fact, with only the smiley face being available, the hair often was the only identifier of whether a figure was supposed to be male or female. Cheers, Ralph

I've had no problems whatsoever with any of the minifigs that I've bought. I rarely do anything with minifigs, so if one of them were to have a leg that wasn't properly attached, I probably would miss it. I did notice that getting the heads of a torso is pretty damn hard, but the solution really is not to press it down completely to its stop. Just a fraction of a millimeter less and it's no problem anymore. The main quality issue that I see with LEGO is the colour constistency issue, but they're aware of it and the subject's probably been beaten to death. A very bright note regarding minifigs, also mentioned by a few other posters, is their design. Back when I was a child and played with minifigs, they all still had the classic smiley face and there was one type of hair for male figs and two for females, available in brown, black and red (one of the female hair parts, anyway). Now look at the variety! I'm not a minifig collector by any means. I mainly consider them bits that also happen to be in the box that the parts that I really want came in, but I've got so many different faces and hair pieces and caps and hats and whatnot, that not two of them are the same. I built a few minifig scale MOCs a few months ago for the first time in at least a decade and much to my surprise I probably had more fun building the figures to go with then than I did with the rest of the MOCs. Cheers, Ralph

I normally don't quote my own posts, but a discussion elsewhere has convinced me that I was too harsh in my comments. I really don't like the look and the agents theme doesn't do much for me. However, that's probably because I mainly build jets and trucks myself, which means that I am particularly hard to please. So, that's more a reflection of my personal bias than that there's anything wrong with these. The set designers work for a specific audience and obviously within constraints on budget and buildability (I know that's not a real word, but you know what I mean) that simply don't apply to MOCs. These sets obviously aren't aimed at me, but at boys between 7 and 12 and I am pretty sure that if LEGO would have released anything like these back when I was a child, I would have thought they were the best thing since sliced bread. Cheers, Ralph

OK, so I'm not going with the choir on this one: I like the fact that they're using some unusual colours, such as silver and dark blue, but the set design is just atrocious! The truck is hideous and the jet fighter is just silly. If I buy any of these, then only at a discount and only for the parts. Cheers, Ralph

Hear hear! I completely agree. Model team rules. Cheers, Ralph

Nice truck. The only thing I'm not so sure about is how you angled the headlights. That makes the truck look as though it had a little accident. The rest of it look great, especially the brick-built letters, the profiled radiator and the spoiler on top of the cabin. I may be tempted to try something like that next time I build a truck. Model Team really shouldn't be in with Bionicle, Technic & Mindstorms, IMO. Other themes is probably the best place for it. Cheers, Ralph

Yes. I'm afraid so. I've been asked for instructions many times and my answer is always the same: I never make them. I'd rather spend my time building than fiddling around with a CAD program. It may not be immediately obvious, but these things tend to be complicated, which turns making instructions for them a pretty big job. Thanks. Quite a few people built Hinds with LEGO before I did, but many of the models weren't all that realistic. People spend a lot of time and effort building the front end and then forget about the tail. The only two that I really liked are this one by Ciamoslaw Ciamek and inevitably the CAD model by Bryce Rollins. I got my hands on some sand green and decided to try whether I could do one that I liked better. You'll see some similarities with the other two, without a doubt, but I think I managed to gave it my own little twist. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. They're actually bigger than minifig scale. Of course people have different views on what minifig scale really is because the figures have somewhat awkward proportions. I'd say anything between 1/40 and 1/45 is reasonable. My planes are 1/36. I know, a silly size, but its just about big enough for me to add things working landing gears on the smaller jets such as the F-16 or F-5s and yet small enough for me to be able to build big aircraft such as the B-1B. BTW, the 'Chinook' is not Chinook, but its smaller and lesser known cousin: the Sea Knight. It has folding rotor blades because it's a ship-based helicopter. Cheers, Ralph

My older pictures on flickr (including those of the B-1 and the Su-27) are all 640x480 and all my pictures on brickshelf are too, simply because I took them at that resolution. My newer pictures on flickr are larger. However, I've disabled downloads for people who are not on my contact list, because I was fed up with people copying my pictures (mainly on MOCpages). Perhaps that's reason why you can't see the high resolution pictures. Send me a flickrmail or comment on one of my pictures and I'll add you to the list. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks Lego officially don't do military stuff, although I suppose their Indiana Jones sets could qualify as such. They also did the quite wonderful Red Baron and Sopwith Camel a few years ago, so it would seem they're not completely opposed to classic military aircraft. I would love to see a LEGO P-51 Mustang or Spitfire One can always dream.... Thanks for the tip and the compliments. Most of the pictures should be available in higher resolution on flickr (just click 'all sizes' above the pictures) so that should help somewhat. I've taken some detail pictures of the landing gears and such of many of my older aircraft, which you can find in my brickshelf folder I can, of course, make some more detailed pictures, although it'll take a while. There are quite a lot of them after all, and taking pictures really isn't my hobby. The F-22 will take a while. I've been thinking and planning for months, but it just has too many things that I haven't figured out how to do yet, such as the cockpit canopy and the undercarriage. At the moment I am also running very low on grey LEGO. I think I have about four 1x2 plates left Cheers, Ralph

This contest has been running for about a month. IMO if people are afraid that they won't make the deadline, they should have started building sooner. Cheers, Ralph

:D They were supposed to be much cheaper to buy and operate than manned aircraft, but in practice that turned out to be a little more difficult, because of an atrocious accident rate. Thanks. Bryce Rollins has done a CAD version of one before, that I quite like, but unfortunately it can't be built, because some parts that he's used aren't available in white. Other than that I've never seen another LEGO Predator either. Cheers, Ralph

Don't the building instruction include an overview of the parts used? If so, you can find the exact part number LEGO use (at least, currently use, because they have an annoying tendency to change them every once in a while) and tell them that next time you contact them about a missing part. What I've done on the past when I had a piece missing from a set is send them a letter with a copy of the page in the instruction book where the missing part was used, with the part in question circled. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. I have thought about building a Ka-50, although it probably won't happen anytime soon. There's a loooong list of other things that I may want to do first. Cheers, Ralph

Thanks. Bryce Rollins has a CAD Predator on brickshelf, so I'm not the first. In fact, I'm probably not the first with most of my MOCs -he seems to have done pretty much everything already, albeit not in actual LEGO. You couldn't make that Preadtor if you wanted to, because the canopy piece and the tailplanes, for instance, aren't available in white. As for the cockpit canopy on the Cobra, I don't think I am really going purist. I chose the brick-built option here for pragmatic reasons. I was unsure how I could make the canopy with my more normal flexible transparent non-Lego plastic, because it consists of too many relatively small windows kept in a fairly complicated frame. To make that sufficiently strong, building the glass out of Lego was a handy solution. Another reason is that I built this for a competition on the flickr Lego military group. The competition allows for non-LEGO canopies, but they are frowned upon. I also didn't really mind using Lego in this case, because it's not a bubble canopy. If it looks a little boxy, that's really no problem here. Cheers, Ralph

In the last weeks I've produced two new small military MOCs: The first is a United States Marine Corps AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopter Here's the link to the picture on flickr and to all the pictures . The second is a United States Air Force MQ-1L Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, a semi-autonomous unmanned aircraft used for reconnaissance, surveillance and even attack missions. No, this is not science fiction! Here's the picture on flickr and all pictures of the Predator They're built to the same scale (1/36) as all my other aircraft. This made building the Predator quite hard, because the real aircraft is very small. Usually it's already a tight squeeze to fit retractable undercarriages to my models, but there was even less space in the Predator. Fortunately, the real aircraft also doesn't have doors to cover the wheels when retracted. Cheers, Ralph

It's a kid's toy after all I'm unworthy . God or not, time to go to bed I'm afraid. Cheers, Ralph

I respect your choice. Of course, Pete's like a silly teenager too:wink: Cheers, Ralph

Dr S., I liked your models they way they were. Your models are somewhat cartoonish. As you know I don't mean that in a bad way -it's actually part of what I like about them. They're still fine now, but I am afraid I don't really see the point in making them studless . Perhaps if you were going for ultra-realism it would make some sense, although I don't mind seeing studs even on realistic models. They're made out of Lego after all and even for your new studless vehicles that's obvious. Did you cave in under pressure from silly teenagers who told you that studless is the way forward ? Cheers, Ralph

A list like that, even if it were to exist would never be complete anyway, because people keep coming up with new ideas all the time. Lowlug, a Dutch lego Users group have a nice overview of techniques on their website: http://www.lowlug.nl/index.php?option=com_...8&Itemid=52 It's in Dutch, but the pictures should be helpful and each separate item also has a link to its source (as it should be). Cheers, Ralph

I do. Still, the existence of Brickish probably does explain some of the apathy. There obviously are some UK-based EB members that aren't members of Brickish and perhaps there are some members of both who would be interested. I wish you the best of luck with trying to organise something. Cheers, Ralph

Sorry mate. I didn't guess that, otherwise I would have written a rather different reply. Cheers, Ralph

Funnily enough there's a Bristol University and there's a University of Western England, located in Bristol. They're separate institutes. These guys claim to be from the Bristol University, West of England. Go figure. Do you really think that this has anything whatsoever to do with a university? I don't. BTW, Bristol University is highly respected in the UK as well as internationally. Cheers, Ralph