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Brilliant!

The Octan truck is 6-wide.

The floatplane seems kind of meh... we just had a police floatplane and a water-dumping flying boat, so... seems kind of redundant. But the helicopter looks sweet. Real U.S. Coast Guard vessels are armed, so I'm already thinking of how to mount a BrickArms minigun on the forecastle of the cutter, and replace those little firefighting waterjets with BrickArms M-60 machine guns ;) The roughly-prototypical 110' Island-class patrol vessel mounts a 25mm chaingun, so a minigun isn't far off the mark.

I don't get the "mini-sub" thing on the Coast Guard cutter. An ROV isn't particularly realistic - and isn't going to be much help in rescuing people. I'll probably scrap it and use the RHIB from the truck-and-boat set. Also, as far as the date, the World of Games link says July.

LEGO has always given the EMS side of emergency services short-shrift in set availability and design. Unfortunately, last year's new 4429 Helicopter Rescue is no exception - while it represents a big improvement from the previous hospital (which, in turn, was the first hospital released since 1987!), its design falls short of greatness or even mediocrity in a number of well-documented ways. The hospital building is absurdly small, much of the space was wasted on a garage and the helicopter looks like it got cut in half by a Sawzall. Don't even get me started on the "helipad" I decided to rectify these problems as best I can, starting with the helicopter. Because I'm an AFOL just coming out of my Dark Ages and my childhood collection is still in storage, I have no spare parts... so I simply bought two copies of 4429 and started bashing. Here's the first result - an expanded helicopter and proper-looking helipad: Ahh, proportion! What a concept. I stretched the fuselage by four studs, using the handy-dandy extra aircraft window panels. What a difference four studs makes. Pop the nose off and HEY! there's actually room for two people. There's a pilot, of course, but also a rearward-facing seat for a flight paramedic to monitor and treat the patient. The curved bricks bump the roof just enough to clear the helmet. Rear 3/4 view, showing the doubled-up 1x12 plates for blades - the original just uses single 1x12s, which look way too short and thin. (I plan to replace them with BrickLinked blade elements at some point, but these work for now.) Also, you can see the engine exhaust gratings and panoply of trans-elements. Because can an emergency vehicle ever have too many blinky things? The stretcher fits comfortably, with plenty of room to spare for this crim. The trans-yellow cheese serves as a "latch" to keep the gurney in place. The new helipad - complete with wheel chocks, plenty of landing lights and a walkway to the hospital. I'm in the process of rebuilding the hospital building into something properly realistic and useful - will post pics when I'm satisfied with the results. :) I hope this inspires folks to jump in and try their hands at MOD/MOCing - all it takes is an extra batch of parts and a little thinking to render one of the more disastrously-designed City sets of 2012 into something worth looking at!

Per the new instructions, the landing gear of the helicopter has been completely changed - uglier, less realistic *and* less functional! http://cache.lego.com/bigdownloads/buildinginstructions/6058365.pdf The swiveling nose gear and sponson-mounted wheels appropriate to an aircraft have been replaced by a terrible, fixed hard plastic roller (NO tire) at the nose and single wheels mounted to the main fuselage *behind* the sponsons. Yuk! Glad I have the original.

They got rid of the SNOT, though, which is a bit of a bummer technique-wise. The mounting for the engines has also been changed. I guess my "OG" 60010-1 is going to be a collector's item now The building instructions for the new 60010 are posted: http://cache.lego.co...ons/6058362.pdf http://cache.lego.co...ons/6058365.pdf EDIT: Upon review of the instructions, the landing gear has also been completely changed and is now ugly *and* unrealistic. The swiveling nose gear and sponson-mounted wheels appropriate to the aircraft have been replaced by a terrible, fixed hard plastic roller at the nose (NO tire) and single wheels mounted to the main fuselage *behind* the sponsons. Yuk! Glad I have the original.

Amazing office building/auto dealer MOC!

I don't think the specialized ladder part makes this set "junior"ish at all, because that's the sort of thing that just can't be properly built out of bricks at that scale, particularly given the un-brick-or-anything-else-friendly existing ladder mold. Even trying to do it with piping and arms or something like that would probably look pretty terrible at Great Vehicles scale.

Two copies of 4429 Helicopter Rescue - they're gonna be MOCed together into one decently-sized hospital and medevac helicopter, rather than being two ugly, half-finished hospitals and helicopters :)

I'm just getting back into LEGOs as an AFOL after my 17-year Dark Ages, and comparing what's available now to what was available then... I think it's sort of like two steps forward and one step backward. In hindsight, I left LEGO right as the "juniorization" wave began. My last new sets were from 1996, and looking at what came out shortly afterward... well, for many years there, I didn't miss much. My last really big sets were the 6339 Shuttle Launch Pad (1995) and 6598 Metro PD Station (1996). Just one year after the release of that classic -- which I would consider the apex of design for the Classic Town era) -- Lego put out the 6554 Blaze Brigade which appears to herald the beginning of the slide into terrible design and janky part selection. So looking strictly at that "nadir," the Jack Stone and 4 Juniors stuff, it's easy to say that LEGO has made great strides in the right direction. I would call out the Great Vehicles series in particular for a combination of functionality, playability, design and realism that was never present in my childhood sets - mainly due to the additional space for features and details present because of the larger scale. While it's true that Classic Town doesn't mix as well anymore, I think that trade-off is acceptable to get the benefits. Put even a good Classic Town fire truck (say, the 6593 Blaze Battler) up next to the 60002 and there's just no comparison. The latter is a better model, a better build and more fun all around. However, I would say the set selection has taken a fair step backward - while police and fire have always been major LEGO themes, I think Classic Town struck a much better balance in terms of having other stuff to do in one's city. Perhaps that will start to change with stuff like the to-be-released Town Square. I'm just glad my mother stored my 100+-set collection dating from 1983 to 1996 in the garage all these years (albeit disassembled in a giant garbage barrel!) She refused to get rid of them and because of her stubbornness, I'll be able to pull out everything from the complete Ice Planet 2002 lineup to the 6542 Launch & Load Seaport!

Yeah, I wonder if they decided the SNOT bits of the sponsons were too finicky for the target building market. A shame, because it really is rather elegant design. My only complaint is that too much of the cabin is taken up by the Power Functions bit, but that's easily fixed by replacing it with a plain old red winch :)

I have the original (and now rare, apparently!) 60010 helicopter with SNOT sponsons. It does not have two water cannons, however - the right-side sponson is fitted with a Technic hole where a second cannon might go, but parts were provided for only one cannon, which the instructions place on the left side under the winch. Is there perhaps a third variant?

Wonderful build! Spectacular detail and functionality. You've inspired me to try something similar at some point soon. Maybe not quite so big... but moving that direction, at least!

Making references to a generic punk rocker with nothing more offbeat than a weird hairstyle and a skull T-shirt is significantly different than making a set of a specific and well-known punk band whose first No. 1 hit single is about spending a day smoking marijuana and masturbating. http://en.wikipedia..../Longview_(song) Green Day is great music, but if LEGO rejected something as innocuous as Firefly, they're not gonna do Green Day.

That's because the average kid who buys a Lone Ranger set is going to want to play with The Lone Ranger, not a bunch of nameless grunt footsoldiers. You can't expect that every kid is going to get every Lone Ranger set just to get your hypothetical one or two that have a The Lone Ranger minifig. Similarly, what kid is going to buy an X-Wing starfighter if they can't play with Luke Skywalker to pilot it? You think the kid wants to fly around as "Unnamed extra X-Wing pilot who is only seen in the movie screaming as he gets blown up and crashes into the Death Star"? How about no? Same thing going back to the Classic Pirates days - not *every* Pirates set had a Brickbeard hook-n-pegleg captain, but several of the biggest would, and if you bought a Black Seas Barracuda and a Rock Island Refuge and a Skull Island, yes, you'd end up with a bunch of Brickbeards. That's because what good is a pirate ship without a captain to go YARR MATEY? LEGO is not going to compromise play value for the kids who can only get one or two sets just so that the grognards who buy the entire lineup don't end up with Luke Skywalker and Brickbeard in quintuplicate. The average kid who buys a LEGO set is not looking to "army-build." So yeah, I mean, I see what you're aiming at, but there's a good reason that TLG does it the way they do it. There's always the secondary market if you want to buy a pile of grunt minifigs.

Green Day is well-known for, ahem, adult lyrics and themes in their music. And we're talking well beyond Simpsons-level stuff - rampant drug use, explicit sexual references, revenge mass-murder (The opening lines of "Having A Blast" from Dookie are: I'm taking all you down with me/explosives duct-taped to my spine/nothing's going to change my mind). Heck, even the band's name is a reference to getting stoned. Don't get me wrong, I listened to Green Day when I was a KFOL (they started in a suburb of San Francisco, basically next door to my hometown)... but I'm pretty sure it's not a band TLG would do a tie-up with.