Martin_B

I really dig the colour scheme there...the pipes snaking around the front of the fuselage are neat too. Good job!

Thanks for posting this (my BSB was second-hand and unboxed)! I read on Bricklink somewhere that non-firing cannons were sold to the US but every Pirate set I've owned has firing ones, so I think moschino's right about the US/EU difference. Must be some legal thing in regards to toy safety or something. I also felt a bit of confusion about the names for these sets - BSB was called 'Dark Shark' in the UK catalogues back in the day, and SES was 'The Black Skull' iirc. No idea why they went to the trouble of coming up with different names for different English-speaking markets!

Thanks for the advice and kind words! @Draiknova: yeah, the gap between the cockpits is a bit 'thick'. I might remove the black bricks between them, but I'm not sure how to fit a thinner dividing 'frame'. Studless plates might work... @vynsane: the landing gear works, but sadly the model's too heavy for it to support the full weight. @Commander Wolf: yeah, there are a lot of curved edges and odd angles. I'm pleased with how the wing outline and engine intakes have turned out, but the 'spine' part behind the cockpits is going to be the final hurdle. The design reminds me of a Russian MiG-29 or SU-27, which I've always thought are a really interesting shape. @Si-MOCs: yep, my first MOC since the Dark Ages kicked in. I've never gone away from minifig scale before, so it's an interesting challenge. I might go back to 1/40 in future, mainly because of the size! Duly noted on the stand though - this one's a temporary thing while I work out how to build a better one. Hopefully it'll be finished early next month...I'll keep you posted!

Excuse my newbie-ness if this has been asked before, but there was no such thing as the internet when I was nine years old... I've been a fan of the Pirates line since they first went on sale, but right from the start I wondered why the pirates themselves seemed to have the biggest and most impressive ships while the 'good guys' seemed to use vessels that were, well, smaller. The Pirates II line seems to be an exception to this, but in the 90s at least there were huge ships like the classic Black Seas Barracuda and Skull Eye Schooner (confusingly, they were given different names in the UK, but I digress...) while the Caribbean Clipper, Imperial Flagship and Armada Flagship were single-masted and had much smaller crews. The Renegade Runner and the Cross Bone Clipper are the only pirate ships that I can find that were actually smaller than those of the 'Imperial' side! I never did understand why. I assumed that the pirates were independent renegades who sailed around looking for treasure and causing mischief while the 'Imperial' fleet were supposed to keep order. Even as a kid I wondered whether the pirates would've preferred smaller ships that were easier to hide, and why the Imperial commanders didn't use bigger ships to make a statement and match the size of the pirates'. I'm not sure if it's Nostalgia Goggles at work here, but Brickbeard's Bounty and the Imperial Flagship don't seem to have the charm of the old ones. I owned the CC in my childhood, but when I realised my dream many years later to own the BSB to go with it, I thought that the CC still isn't as cool!

Quite a few of my friends are fellow SF fans and in a recent pub discussion two of them mentioned that they'd ordered models of the 'Mave', a jet plane from the anime series Yukikaze. We've all watched and enjoyed it, but I'm more of a fan of the 'Super Sylph', a jet design from earlier in the series. I flippantly said, "I don't like the Mave all that much and if the model of the Super Sylph isn't available any more, I might as well make my own." I have a copy of the series on DVD and I've also read the novel that it's based on; for whatever reason, there's a helpful list of the dimensions and specs at the end of the book. I used the anime adaptation's portrayal of the Super Sylph - and some photos of that now-discontinued model made by Alter - as inspiration for my own version. There are a few Lego MOCs of the Mave on Google Images, but there was only one of the Super Sylph that I found during my researching, on MOC Pages...and that's not been built yet as far as I know. I didn't want to copy someone else's work so to be different - and get more detail - I decided on a Technic scale, which by my reckoning is 1/20 rather than 1/40 of the 'Minifig'. The end result then will be roughly a metre in length...which is a daunting prospect for the first Lego project I've worked on since I hit the Dark Ages in my early teens! I've posted some photos on G+ as I went along, but if anyone has comments or constructive criticism I'd be really grateful. There are certain aspects of the build that I'm really happy with, but it's always helpful to get an outsider's perspective since I've been working on the thing on and off for several months now. I'm actually glad it's almost finished!

Hi all! I registered here quite recently but it was a day or two before the upgrade so my old account sort of disappeared. I only had chance to make a couple of posts, so no harm done! It's great to see this place is back up and running again. I currently live in a small rural town the northeast of England and recently started getting back into Lego after rediscovering my collection and taking on a MOC challenge from a couple of friends. I feel that I was able to enjoy a 'golden age' with the late 80s and early 90s before adolescence and school/university took over though, so I have fond memories of the original Pirates, Blacktron, Ice Planet and so on. I'm a bit of a general geek so I have a thing for SF, history, guitar music, anime and cult movies which has rekindled my interest. Now I have my own living space and disposable income I can indulge in my nerdy hobbies, so I guess I'm not alone in being a young AFOL. I've stumbled on a few community sites such as the Brothers Brick blog and the Bricklink marketplace, and I've been amazed at how people have made some genuinely astonishing things out of something I used to think of as a toy or educational thing for kids. I lurked on here for a short while, was even more amazed at what the members have worked on and decided to register. I have a nearly-complete MOC in the works, and since I've found where I mislaid my digital camera I'll make a thread and post some pics soon. I'm happy to answer any other questions!