NathanR

I grant you that! It's just that I always keep sets as sets, all neatly packaged and sometimes stored by bag number. I don't have many other bricks available to hand, so I rely on LDD and the like to make my designs, then I order the parts. Actually, if it was just for me I probably wouldn't care so much. Unfortunately, the models I'm designing at the moment have attracted interest from work colleagues... in fact, I'm aware of at least one instance where one of my MOC's even got ordered as a kid's birthday present. So I find myself trying to think and work like an actual Lego designer, following the same guidelines and rules they have to... it makes things very difficult for me...

Yep, I've used Bricks & Pieces (B&P). It has a much broader parts selection than the Pick-A-Brick (PAB), though curiously B&P and PAB can have the same element at different prices. Very occasionally it pays to shop around between the two. Basically all licensed parts are permanently out of stock. I think Lego did this to stop scalpers who were abusing the system - I think I heard something about Harry Potter figures (so, early 2000s) being bought in the hundreds from B&P for about £1.50 a figure, then being resold online for £15. Licensed parts are listed, but only available if you're requesting a replacement for a missing or broken brick, in which case you have to prove you own the set by quoting a code on the instruction book. That said, sometimes licensed parts get overlooked and are available for a short time through B&P. For example, I picked up the Portal 2 Chell figure, and the black panther animal through B&P. There's a thread that keeps track of the available parts: Lego bricks are identified by two numbers. "Element" uniquely identifies brick shape and colour. "Design number" identifies the shape. So a search for "76382" brings up a list of 815 mini-figure torsos (many of which are out of stock). Unfortunately each head has it's own design code, so you seem to be stuck searching for the sets one by one. Hope this helps!

Wow, that is awesome! Your Lego set is now definitely something to treasure!!! (BTW, your link goes to a sign-in page so I can't see whatever to was that was there)

Actually I build the other way round... I do everything in LDD, and then when I'm reasonably certain it will hold together I order the bricks to try in real life! LDD is usually pretty good at catching errors, but I have seen some funny "illegal builds" that it allows. My favourite is if you surround a 4070 1x1 angular brick with regular 1x1 bricks... the side-stud collides with a brick so you could never do this in real life. Thanks for the links. I couldn't find the 75937 and 15712 "error" referred to, but I've been wondering if this is actually a property of the Lego bricks. I did try a few tests with real bricks, but the hinges move so easily and the gap is so small that I couldn't really see it. Real life seems to let this work ok, but I'm not sure if it works because of the tolerances in Lego bricks or because it's putting a strain on the pieces (which might do long term damage, something I'm keen to avoid).

Sorry to necro post my own thread, but I have another connection question - oddly enough on the same MOC (yes, I am that slow a designer....) If you place a bar/clip hinge at 90 degrees, it looks like everything stays "in system" and LDD allows you to connect the orange 1x4 plate to a 99206 2x2x2/3 snot plate. However, it turns out that the the light grey 1x2 hinge part is actually a fraction too high up, and set a fraction too far back. It's a paper-thin shift, but you can see it below when you look at the dark red 1x4 plate, m which is connected to 99206 and the others are added in after. LDD says this is ok, and it seems to work in real life. But is this really a legitimate connection? Would I risk cracking the hinges over time? LXF file of the bricks: https://bricksafe.com/files/NathanR/techniques/90-degree-bar/90 dgree bar.lxf

I’ve been experimenting with 75937 “parabolic rings”, or “plate 2x2 with bar frame octagonal”, as bricklink describes it. I’m struggling to understand how it can connect to other elements, so I was curious - what connections are legitimate, and how do you use this part in your own MOCs? From what I can see, in official lego sets the parabolic ring is typically restricted to detailing like on the rathtars in 75180 Rather Escape, or the base for legs of Destroyer Droids: However, the ring can also be used as a structural element for brick built cylinders. You can connect 61252 plate 1x1 with clip horizontal and the studs will line up perfectly (left) and you can extend the assembly with bricks and remain “in system”: Changing the clip to 15712 tile 1x1 with vertical clip, it turns out the parabolic ring is 9 plates high, or 11 with two clips attached (left). Curiously, mecabricks says this is impossible, but it appears to work in real life. It turns out that in LDD and real life, the 1x1 tile part of 15712 has a slightly lower height than a standard 1x1 tile - why?? To keep this kind of attachment "in system"? It is certainly a useful feature, because if you add an extra two plates top and bottom, the entire assembly exactly matches a 6x6 plate (right). At least, it does in LDD (unable to test in real life and I'm not sure what CAD programs to trust any more). The two clip types are also equivalent. 15712 + two 1x1 plates matches the height of the 61252 (Left). The gap between them appears to be two and a half plates (?), but I’m not sure. The cylinder with the tile clips can be extended with bricks, but the plate across the top must be an odd length of studs. I assume this is like with technic triangles, where you count the gaps, not the studs, from mid-point to mid-point (right). So in this case it's a half plate from each of the parabolic rings, + 9 plates = 10 plates = 4 gaps: Now this where things get a bit crazy for me. If I build using the 15712 vertical clip, the whole assembly goes “out of system”. Zooming in between the 1x1 brick and the black tile, you can see a hairline gap - quarter, maybe eighth plate thick? What causes this gap? As a result, the separation between the two rings is slightly less than 6 plates, resulting in a collision at the halfway point: I’m not sure if this counts as being within lego tolerances. But how would you go about getting this kind of assembly back "in system". Is it even possible to close this gap? Does this even matter in real life? An answer is kind of important to me because I've been using it as a key component in a particle physics detector MOC that's taken me some months... I was just about to order parts when I discovered this "flaw", and I'm not sure how disastrous it is: Anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these geometry issues. And do you have any other ways of building with parabolic ring? Are there any other interesting features of this piece that I've missed?

Now this is why I don't collect the brickheadz. They look fun but there is no way I will ever be able to get all of them...

Ah, I know the bits you mean, I think they are called the engine fairings (but I might be wrong). I've not had any problems with them on my model, but I grant that;'s a weak spot of the design. Still, it's a pretty ingenious solution given the inability to create new parts.

Ctrl+K (or Cmd+K for Mac) will save a screenshot as a png, which defaults to a transparent background. When you then use another program to convert the png to a jpg or other file with no support for transparency, the background usually defaults to white. Any photo editor should be able to select the transparent background layer, you do a flood fill of any colour you want, then save it as a jpg.

Really? For me this is about as close as you can get to a flawless lego set - what new parts would you have liked?

Thanks for the suggestions! The base needs to be very strong, since it has to support the entire weight of the rocket and the launch tower. I'm very familiar with the UCS falcon, but the Sydney Opera House was incredible. I'm really regretting not buying that one while it was in the shops, it was an amazing build. Trying to figure out the interior structure will have to wait a little bit though. After testing different arrangements of plates for the very base of the MLP, it seems I can really simplify the internal wall structure by nudging the exhaust vent one stud away from the tower. However, this breaks the accuracy of the model. I found a French website with loads of technical drawings, and at the moment the ten stud gap between exhaust vent and the wall on the right (in the photo above) puts the centre of the rocket exactly where the blueprints say it should go. Of course, I may have to move everything over to accommodate the Launch Tower foundations. Decisions, decisions... Over the last week I've been getting in a mess with the base of the launch tower, since no individual side is flat: The four supports all taper inwards. I did consider trying to build some "Pythagorean Quadruples". These are like the triples (e.g. the 3,4,5 triangle has sides which are all whole numbers), but work in 3D with a^2 + b^2 + c^2 = d^2. An example is a 1,2,2,5... diagonal, I guess? But I think these would be too fragile in Lego, at least In don't see a way to anchor them securely and provide enough support for the rest of the tower. So, I am back to the pythagorean triples, trying to come up with suitable triangles that will work in Lego bricks: There's a lot of scaffolding, a lot of trial and error, a lot of angles that almost but don't quite work. It's possible I've miscalculated the height at which each platform must be placed (which complicates things) but I'm also trying to look at triangles that are possible when (say) a stacked wall of technic bricks have one or two plates in there as well. I don't suppose anyone knows of any guides detailing possible lego triangles?

Wow, that's harsh! I'm not exactly a "skilled builder" but I appreciate the simplicity of searching or browsing bricks in LDD, the part snapping features, and the simple/clean interface. Sure LDD has it's flaws - new parts are added rarely, many bionicle-type parts are missing, and the flex-parts seldom ever work for me. Building technic models is the only really difficult part, but once you learn how to rotate gears so they can align, it becomes fairly straightforward. LDD is useless at creating instructions, and always has been. But then there is the likes of Blueprint which can handle that. I confess I m not familiar with LDCad, but mostly because I'm a Mac user. The only Lego-building software available for the Mac is LDD and Bricksmith, which has seen fewer updates than LDD in recent years and I find incredibly tedious and frustrating to work with. The mecabricks website is also good, but I struggle a little without the part-snapping. So LDD is the gold standard for me, and will likely remain so for many years to come. Oh, and a small aside - I did once try writing my own cad editor for macOS. I learned a lot about SceneKit, Swift and ObjectiveC, but the stumbling block for me was actually parsing the LDraw file format. It's... archaic, really, and requires very low level manipulation of the geometry data, such as manual calculation of the normal vectors. It would take a genius to figure this out, and I imagine that's why there are so few Lego cad programs around.

Bricklink is a fantastic resource when it comes to mould variations. That brick has part ID 50373, but the older variant (without the stud notches) is part 2399: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=2399#T=C There's a fair few old sets which featured it. If you're missing an instruction book, then you can often download them for free from Lego customer service, or somewhere like lego.brickinstructions.com Which set are you trying to build?

If you've registered for the VIP program, you'll definitely get points. They can take 24 hours to appear on your account though. Really? I thought the black VIP cards were just a treat for having bought the falcon, are they really different to regular VIP cards? (And, if so, where do I sign up?)

Wow, that is beautiful! I don't usually like it when bricks are altered, but the paint really brings it alive. To be honest, I didn't think it was Lego at all until I recognised the moulding on the boots!

Argh, never mind... Maybe another will come along. Or you could try waiting, the rumour threads have been buzzing with speculation of a new UCS ISD next year... though I'll believe it when I see it.

Depending on what parts were missing, that ISD could have been either really easy to restore... or an absolute nightmare. The engines and shield generators were unique to the set and are almost impossible to get hold of, but the rest is relatively straightforward. The 10030 ISD went through a few revisions over the years it was on sale. The first edition sets came with a standard bound manual, but it was so thick that the spine had a tendency to crack and fall apart if it was used too much. So at some point (not sure when exactly), they switched to issuing the sets with spiral bound manuals that were more likely to survive. The original editions of the set came in the old light/dark greys, the last few were made in the modern light/dark bluish greys (around 2002 I think). Apparently, some boxes even contained a mixture of both shades of grey (though I've never actually seen this).

Ok, this just had me burst out laughing This is insanely outrageous, but brilliantly executed. I'm not sure which I like more actually, the millennium falcon toilet lid, or the obviously B-Wing handle...

Ever since I got my 21309 Saturn V, I thought it would be cool to have a model of the launch tower to go with it. Well, it may be a long time before I get a chance at building this model for real, but I have completed the digital design! If anyone is interested, an LDD file is available from my bricksafe page: https://www.bricksafe.com/pages/NathanR/real-space/apollo-lut Original first post: Ever since I got my 21309 Saturn V, I thought it would be cool to have a model of the launch tower to go with it. I'm clearly not the only one because a similar model recently reached 10k votes on Lego Ideas - however, I'm impatient and so I decided to start building my own. I've been working in LDD due to a lack of physical bricks, and the first (very rough) sketch model is complete: The Saturn V rocket was launched from the Mobile Launch Platform (MLP, nothing to do with ponies...), a two story structure on which the rocket was constructed and fuelled. It measured 169x135 feet, or 56x46 studs at 1:110 scale, and also carried a 380 ft tall launch umbilical tower (LUT). The tower featured nine arms that provided electricity and other services to various parts of the rocket, and swung away just a fraction of a second before it blasted off. The rocket did not stand on the engine nozzles, but was instead suspended over a single exhaust vent measuring 45x45 feet. This should be 15x15 studs but I've gone with 14x14 studs for ease of building: I'm particularly proud of the design of the hold down arms: These four clamps held the rocket down until all five engines were confirmed to be running at full power, at which point they retracted behind heat-proof shields and allowed the Saturn V to soar skywards. Three additional holddown arms were located around the pad and have yet to be modelled. I'll add details once I have the core structure sorted. The base of the MLP uses 1x4x6 door frames like the version that was on Lego Ideas - an inspired choice which I've temporarily copied here (I'm actively trying to avoid looking at the Ideas model so I don't copy it), but I'm toying with 1x1x5 bricks to represent the support columns instead. I could really use some help and advice with this model though. How do I make it structurally sound? The MLP is a glorified box with a hole in it, but I've never built anything this big before and I'm not sure how to link together the baseplates. I had a few ideas for some internal supports: Do you think these would be strong enough? Should the outer wall be thicker? Should I criss-cross the entire hollow space with brick beams? How do I strike a good balance between strength and low parts count? You can view larger pictures and find the LDD file on bricksafe. If there's interest I'll make instructions available when the model is complete. Any advice or constructive feedback would be much appreciated!!

Wow, I love this set! I don't mind the stickers, it's a nice way to add some lovely extra detail on to it. Does anyone know any more about this set? I checked bricklink and it's only available from Hong Kong at the moment, is it likely to get a wider release?

Interesting. I think I'll go out on a limb and say Wonders of Peru. It's an interesting looking display, and certainly not your typical Lego model. I've never even heard of Gilmore Girls, and I can't really see a Lego model of it selling well. "I am your father" will fail for obvious reasons, it's Star Wars and I don't think you can really do the hand-slicing thing with a Lego figure. The space shuttle model would be fantastic, and I would dearly love it (in spite of already having Shuttle Adventure) but I think it's just too soon after the Apollo rocket. There have been a lot of space-exploration and Nasa related sets in the Ideas lineup, and I think they need to preserve an eclectic mix. The research jet looks bright and colourful, but I think it's success depends on the current review - if the red arrow jet passes, then this would be too similar. If not, it might have a chance. And lastly, the launch tower has no hope of getting made. The Saturn V is not retiring "soon", Lego put out another statement to clarify this after more rumours started, but it will almost certainly have gone by the time this set made not to the shelves. And this set is useless on it's own - you need the rocket to go on it. So much though I'd love to have it, I don't see this getting made at all.

Oh boy... this is going to be a controversial topic. For me, a UCS set is one which carries a nameplate, or is of a sufficient size and detail that I consider it worthy of the title. Some sets like 7191 X-Wing or 10179 Millennium Falcon are obvious. From sheer size, detail, complexity they deserve the name. Others like the often ignored Darth Maul and Yoda statues have no nameplate but are still epic builds and not your usual; Lego playset. The grey area comes with sets like Insult Attack on Hoth, or the Ewok Village, or even the 75159 Death Star. These are large, intricate builds but still playsets, so I consider them large, but not ultimate. The real hazy area is with the likes of the Jawa sand crawler, because it's both an ultimate collector set and a playset just because it worked at mining scale. So is BB-8 a UCS set? It ticks all the right boxes for me - does it for you?

Well this is beautiful! Brilliantly detailed, though the underside looks perhaps a little plain in comparison. The interior is a really sweet touch, though I would have wished for it to be a little more extensive. I really want to see the interior skeleton, and get a look at how the frame compares to the original... Lego can't win! When the Super Star Destroyer came out, people were complaining about the exclusive bounty hunter figures it had!

Ok... the price is not as good as I was hoping but not too bad either...

Ok, now I'm starting to fall in love with this model. But damnit, how am I going to afford this, where will I put the box, and, heck, I'm not sure I'd even have the space to sit and build it!