NathanR

Holy crap, that is one huge Saturn V! The LUT is a little skeletal, but for sheer size this is a jaw-dropping MOC! (Do you have, or know of, any closeups of the Apollo CSM? Would like one at mini-fig scale to go with the new Lunar Lander set )

This is absolutely stunning, I love it!! I'm going to have to study this and see if I can make mine do the same.

Wow, this is awesome! I used a bit of technic in my own LUT model, but I never dreamed it would be possible to do one with pure technic. Very neat solution for the base of the tower, getting all four sides to slope inwards. And fantastic to see the crawler done as well!

That was fun, really well made!

Damn it, another exclusive I will never get to own. I want one of those! (By the way, just how big is the footprint?? Some photos make it look like a 2x4 tile, the bricklink link looks like a 4x3 or 4x4 tile?)

Huh. I think I should give it another try then. It has been 15 years since I last watched it... Thanks, glad you like them!

With that many pieces I could do the whole island - all the launch bays, a retractable swimming pool, the falling palm trees... Now that really would be one hell of a playset! I'm 29, and Thunderbirds was a childhood favourite of mine too! It really is an amazing show. Do you mean the matchbox die-cast metal toys? I still have mine from when I was a kid, though they were heavily played with and are a bit battered now. I really had those in mind when designing the group, that's why FAB 1 is so oversized compared to the other vehicles. In the show it could be carried inside TB2's pod! And yes, TB1's wings are way too chunky, I'd welcome any suggestions for making them a bit thinner! Minifigures would be awesome! But there are two reasons why I didn't create any. One, Lego Ideas sets have a limited number of "slots" for new part colours and new printed designs, and the minfigures would tie up slots for some pretty critical part recolours (each Thunderbird craft needs at least two pieces in a new colour). And two, my graphics design skills are pretty bad, I don't think I could do the characters justice!

Thanks for all the kind words! They really mean a lot to me. I'm really thrilled that one of my MOCs has ended up on the eurobricks front page Actually, the one sticker I forgot to design was the 2x4 tile on the pod door carrying the number, that's why you never see the pod door in any of the images To keep down the parts count and price of the finished set, I'd probably just go with one pod and maybe some extra 2x4 tiles and stickers/prints. That way, you can choose whatever pod number you want! Oh you poor thing...

I would love to have part 24201 (inverted curved slope 2x1) in blue. It's the only part I need to be able to finish my nanoscale model of the LHCb detector (one of the experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider). I designed the other three detectors to the same scale, and LHCb is the only one I haven't been able to build in real life yet. I'd love to get a complete collection!

There is one on Lego Ideas (not mine), which seems to be doing well with the votes. I would certainly love to have a Snow White Lego set.

Fantastic models, they look really fun! Keep the builds coming! :)

Thanks, I'm glad you liked the models! Though I cheated a bit on the TB2 yellow stripe, it relies on a couple of stickers to keep the pattern. Oops, there was a typo in the link, it's fixed now. But I only have extra views of the thunderbird craft, the only pod vehicle I designed was the Mole. I wanted to do some of the other pod vehicles, like Firefly or the Recovery vehicles, but it's surprisingly difficult to make them recognisable and small enough to fit through the 4x4 pod door. It is indeed! Though I haven't tried it in real life yet. All the parts exist, the bright pink 4x8 plate and headlamp brick (4070) haven't been made for four or five years but are quite plentiful on bricklink. For the rest, a lot of the pink parts were introduced this year in the Overwatch sets.

Gerry Anderson's classic Thunderbirds TV series follows the exploits of International Rescue, a secret organisation run by the Tracy family from an island in the Pacific Ocean. Whenever disaster strikes, whenever people are in danger, the family leaps into action to save the day using incredible machines capable of pulling off any rescue - be it in the air, on land, in the sea or deep in space. The show has been a firm favourite of mine ever since I was a child, back in the 1990s. The five main craft have a few play features built into them. Thunderbird 1 has opening wings: Thunderbird 2 can be raised on four detachable legs, then you pull the lever at the back to drop the pod. You can load up Thunderbird 4, or in this case, it's Pod 3 carrying the Mole! And Thunderbird 3 can be docked with Thunderbird 5! I also went to town with a few bonus models. After all, what collection of Thunderbirds vehicles would be complete without Thunderbird 6, the Tiger Moth biplane from the 1968 movie? Or Lady Penelope's beautiful Rolls-Royce, FAB1? And finally, you can't have International Rescue without someone in peril, in need of rescuing. So there is the chance to recreate the first ever episode! The new supersonic airliner, Fireflash, is trapped in the sky. Its landing gear has been sabotaged, and its fuel is running low. Help the International Rescue crew guide the plane to a landing on the roofs of the three included elevator cars. Will they bring the plane to a standstill before running out of runway? These digital MOCs have taken several months to prepare, with most of the time spent in creating the 50+ custom stickers/patterns and learning how to generate the backdrops using Blender. It would not have been possible to create these images without the use of Mecabricks' fantastic Blender template, and the Mecabricks render farm. Additional images are available on my brick safe page: https://bricksafe.com/pages/NathanR/lego-ideas-thunderbirds I've also submitted the models to Lego Ideas, if you like then you can vote for them here: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/6e7946e4-9da4-4195-af68-a93615c398b1 Update: 30/9/19: Happy Thunderbirds Day! It's 54 years since Thunderbirds was first broadcast! To celebrate, I have added the spaceship Zero-X to my collection of Thunderbird vehicles:

The next version of MacOS (10.15 Catalina) will remove all support for 32-bit apps, so LDD will definitely no longer function. This is really upsetting for me, it's like losing an old friend, and I haven't found any alternative editor that matches LDD for its simplicity, ease of use, and low computer resource usage. On a separate note, OpenGL is deprecated on MacOS but still available, so you can run all the MacOS LDraw editors for now. However, old apps (like Bricksmith) that rely heavily on low-level OpenGL commands will probably fail in the next few years. You should switch to something that is being actively maintained/developed like LDCad or Stud.io.

The 32005 is designed to connect to the towball pieces (2736, 3184, 2508 ...). Usually gets used as part of the suspension in technic cars, where the towball adds some extra freedom of movement over using a standard beam.

Well this is a mixed bunch... Hercules, Jafar, Elsa, Chip'n'Dale are brilliant. Does Hades come with an alternative orange hairpiece? Having all three of Donald's nephews seems a bit lazy, they're identical figures and it seems a wasted opportunity. Would have much rather had classics like Snow White or Pinocchio. But why on earth have they duplicated the figures from the Steamboat Willie set? That steering wheel must be the largest minifig accessory ever done, at least it will be easy to feel for this figure!

This set looks awesome! I really didn't like the original submission, I felt it was just something that would gather dust on a shelf, but the update is adorable and has some really cute features. Not sure why they wasted pieces on the Mickey Mouse shaped display stand for the figures, they really should have swapped that out for the musical goat. The set is overpriced for what you get, but I still want it... Also, does anyone else think that Mickey's hat looks just like the one Goofy is often depicted wearing? Could this perhaps mean we will get Goofy in the upcoming Disney CMF line?

Well, I gave up on retractable landing legs for Thunderbird 2. I've taken a plate out of each support strut to make the craft slimmer, I beefed up the engines, and added the tail fin. Really wishing 2x3 tiles were made in green. "Only" the nose cone left to do... Does anyone have any thoughts on the sculpting of the curves, any suggestions for how to improve the design?

Yep, the Saturn V is one of the best Lego models ever released. I basically spent last year designing an 8100 piece model of the launch tower to go with it. There's not that much interest here on eurobricks, but there is a brilliant group on facebook called "Lego Saturn V mods and space builds". Originally dedicated to mods and improvements on the Saturn V Ideas set, it has expanded to cover 1:110 scale Lego models of just about every rocket, shuttle and satellite ever created.

Not sure if these circles go big enough, but you might find some useful techniques here: http://mocrecipes.com/2015/10/23/polygon-circles/

I was afraid of that... Though given the number of MacBooks that appear in Lego designer videos, and that a fair few of Lego's design team use LDD for prototypes, I had kind of hoped that an update might have been made in this case. Thanks for the suggested alternatives. Mecabricks is a brilliant website but it always troubles me that I have no local copy of the models/files, and I've been frightened of Studio ever since the brickiest review a year or so back mentioned it making MacBooks run hot and caused excessive battery drain (I killed my last MacBook with something like that...). I will give LDCad a try though. I'm not so sure. I think we are already on the "legacy" support for 32bit applications. And with OpenGL on it's way out (at least for the Mac) I worry that a fair bit of the Draw software like Bricksmith, LDView, LDGLite etc will be failing soon. Oh, and this was the error message you asked about: Unfortunately I didn't think to click Learn more and I can't get the message to reappear

In the last few months, I've noticed that when I open LDD for the first time after installing an update to MacOS Mojave, I will be given a warning message from the operating system that says "Lego Digital Designer is not optimised for your Mac and needs to be updated. This app will not work with future versions of macOS and needs to be updated to improve compatibility. Contact the developer." I emailed Lego customer service about this and received the stock answer that LDD is no longer officially supported, try updating your graphics card drivers, etc. At a rough guess I'd say the problem is really due to Apple retiring the old 32bit libraries and phasing out support for OpenGL. I'm worried that I'll wake up one morning, install a "critical security update" and suddenly find that ten years worth of lxf files have just become unreadable. Is there any way of getting a better answer out of Lego, to see if they will actually address this problem? Or do you think they will just abandon MacOS and make LDD a Windows-only program?

I'm on the fence with this one. There's a lot to like about this set, but the problem is that you can look at the original project and see what hasn't been included. The included figures are nicely done, the faces struck me as a bit too human at first, not cartoonish enough, but they are growing on me. I do wonder if Wilma and Betty might have worked better as mini-dolls, so that they looked more like their cartoon characters, but I reckon I'm in a minority of one with this opinion. Barney should have had the short "child" legs, Pebbles and Bam-Bam also should have been included but I can live without them (I just have stronger memories of the earlier episodes before they got introduced). The absence of Dino is simply appalling though. I get that they couldn't have added a custom moulded figure, but Jurassic Park sets have had these cute baby raptors, ok they're a little undersized, surely they could have made one in pink? The car is very well executed. I agree that the the 2x2 round tiles with wood pattern are a bit too big, but they do a great job at hiding the technic brick making up the core frame, so I think it's an acceptable solution. The front wall of the house is just a flat vertical wall, it needs some texture or shaping. Round the back, the fold-out floor panels seem a bit superfluous. It took me a while to realise the telephone wasn't just some weird light shade, the phone in the original submission was a lot nicer. Also, I really wish they could have kept the bird playing the gramophone record. There are some nice touches, the use of the Uni-kitty display stand as the coffee table is sheer genius (I never thought that piece could be used in any other situation!), the tiger print curtains, and I like the TV .So it's not a day-one purchase for me, but it's definitely something I'd like to pick up at some point.

I've always been a fan of Gerry Anderson's classic 1960s puppet TV series "Thunderbirds", which revolves around a secret organisation using amazingly advanced vehicles to rescue people, so I've set myself the challenge of building all five Thunderbirds out of Lego. The aim is to submit the full collection to Lego Ideas. So far I have designed four out of the five craft, and I'm working on custom stickers for the final CGI renders: Unfortunately, I am a bit stuck with Thunderbird 2 and could do with some help. Calling International Rescue I mean, eurobricks.... Thunderbird 2 is a cargo transport consisting of a thin frame wrapped around a large removable pod and once it lands, the frame is raised off the ground on telescopic legs to allow the pod to unload its cargo. I have a design for the pod and a basic outline for the frame, using the larger bracket bricks to try and keep things secure, and it would be fairly easy to add studs on the bottom and have fully detachable landing legs:

There is indeed such a tile, but I don't think it will be so easy to modify the car to use it. Looking at the teaser video, I think the car "wheels" are 4x4 cylinder bricks with a technic axle through the centre. The axle will pass through a technic brick in the chassis frame, and then 2x2 round bricks (capped with the 2x2 log tile) hold the whole thing together. I love the new fabric piece! But I'm really surprised to see it. As far as I know, the only other "new" part to appear in an Ideas set was the sonic screwdriver from the Doctor Who Tardis set, but even then the release of that Ideas set was delayed so the part could appear "first" in the Lego Dimensions Doctor Who character pack. I'm wondering what other set the fabric roof will appear in...