Zenithfleet

In a similar vein to the Bespin story upthread... I haven't posted here for years and years, but I just have to share this story. Four or five years ago I went on a bit of a Lego binge so I'd have a solid City collection to pass on to kids one day. (Or at least that was my excuse). At the same time I washed and sorted most of my childhood sets to check that all the parts were still there. Unfortunately I burned out before I had quite finished, and left it packed away to complete the job "in a couple of months' time". For the next few years I didn't think too much about Lego. Mainly because I knew that if I did, I'd get sucked back in and spend far too much money on it again. However, the appearance of Blocks magazine in the local newsagent, with its article on the new Pirate sets, got my attention. It occurred to me that several family friends' kids were finally getting old enough to inherit some Lego goodies without chewing the feet off the minifigs. (Yes, little brother, I'm still annoyed about that. ) So, last week, I had a rummage through the storage crates for the first time in years. Not only did I dig out a few old sets to pass on (farewell Aquasharks and my trusty Renegade Runner, it's time you terrorised new seas), I finally finished off the parts-checking job on the rest of the sets. Such a big bag of unsorted Blacktron II parts... so many globe cockpits to build... Anyway, while going through the crates, I noticed a couple of unopened Modular Building sets I'd picked up during my binge period. "Huh," I thought. "Forgot I bought those." I'd always planned to build them back then--in fact it was reading the excellent reviews on this very site that convinced me to grab them--but had put it off for a rainy day. To be honest, I didn't really think the Modulars would fit in with the rest of my City stuff, which is more kid-friendly and suburban, based around the 50th anniversary Town Plan and some Creator houses. I came close to cracking them open last week, but between the sorting and the family shenanigans I ran out of time. I stowed them back on the shelf with the vague thought that they might get built "in a couple of months' time"... and went back to work. Fast forward to this weekend. Still in a dreamy nostalgic reverie over old 80s Space sets and idly browsing eBay to admire all the Space Police I sets I can't afford, I notice that one of my MISB Modulars (the Grand Emporium) has been discontinued and is now fetching more than double the RRP price. "Crikey and also strewth!" I think. "Lucky I didn't open that one. Might see if I can sell it or trade it to someone. ...Hmm, I wonder if my other unopened Modular set is worth anything these days?" *types 'Lego Green Grocer' into eBay search bar* *stares at sold listings prices* *loud thunk as jaw hits floor* *louder thunk as the rest of me falls off chair* Long story short, I may or may not be acquiring quite a few old Space sets in the not-too-distant future.* *or paying insurance bills

The Futuron 6932! Absolutely, positively, definitely. In Australia it was called the "Tri-Sec 200 Satellite Carrier", despite a glaring lack of satellites, and incidentally this set was how I learned at age 5 that "tri" means "three" :-$ THE defining Lego set of my childhood. (Of course, it helps that I never owned anything bigger than this until Ice Planet came along.) With other great sets, I'd happily buy multiples, but for the 6932, I don't think I'll ever own more than one. I mean, that would be like having a Star Wars movie with more than one Millennium Falcon in it. ;-) Incidentally, from a jaded adult perspective I'd probably vote for the 6781 SP-Striker. But the child in me has a fit of jealous rage every time I see it... (bit of a rant coming...) ...see, Lego was REALLY expensive here in Australia back in those days, so almost all my sets were tiny little buggies and one-man skimmers. Anyway, one day, the year Space Police came out, my aunt came to visit. She took me to the Lego aisle of the supermarket and offered to buy me any Space set on the shelf. ANY SET. I remember staring longingly at the 6781, but in a fit of unchildlike thoughtfulness, I decided that it wasn't fair to ask her to buy something that expensive, so I asked for the smaller 6886 instead. I remember her giving me a strange look and saying "Are you sure?" and like a fool I nodded :'-( Kicked myself for YEARS after that. If only my parents hadn't taught me to be considerate of others, dammit! X-D ...thinking back, it's probably a good thing the Mission Commander and the Futuron Monorail weren't on the shelf that day, or I'd feel even worse :-)

Argh! Voted for the wrong one! (Intergalactic Command Base instead of Message-Intercept Base). Anyway... I was born too late for the old Classic Space bases, and I've never quite worked up the need to go track them down since they're so small yet expensive (though I do think they're very cute). The bases I actually owned as a kid were the Ice Planet, Spyrius and Exploriens bases, but my best friend had a 6987 Message-Intercept Base and it was the Holy Grail of Space sets as far as I was concerned :-$ I've just managed to find one for myself on Bricklink and it's gorgeous! So many clever areas and mechanisms. (And it has the most insane alternative designs on the box... a gigantic walker, a huge spaceship, some kind of ground-crawling insectoid monstrosity...) Fun side story: Australia, like many countries, has its own unique names for Lego sets. Most of the names aren't nearly as odd or interesting as the American ones. When I was growing up my friend and I always referred to the 6987 as the "Blacktron Black Star Base". For many years I've assumed that we'd made a childish mistake, and that the real name was something dull like "Blacktron Star Base". But... a few weeks ago I got hold of a 1989 Australian catalogue, and it's true! The 6987 really was called the Black Star Base! I feel vindicated X-D

This set defaults to 10/10 for me simply because it was the second and biggest Soldiers set I ever owned as a kid |-/ My pirates wreaked devastation with their enormous and terrifying 6268 Renegade Runner (known as the Seastar here in Oz) and had the impregnable vastness of the 6270 Forbidden Island to fall back to. All my poor outnumbered Soldiers had was a garrison of three men, one Broadside's Brig, and that daft dinghy with the cannon (6245)... plus a lot of tame sharks. 8-| The funny thing is that I recently inherited (okay, begged and pleaded until it was given to me) a friend's old Pirate sets, and he too had tons of Pirates and exactly three Soldiers. Hmm... not quite on topic, but did anyone else have this imbalance as a kid? (Another of my childhood friends was the same, but a third guy exclusively collected Soldiers, so he was the only one I could have proper battles with.)

Wow...! Thanks languages. :oD Been looking on the net for scans but couldn't find any. So, er, might as well lock this thread, then...

Hey folks, I'm after some BSB instructions. The originals go for a pretty penny on Bricklink but I'm not interested in the instructions collector-wise - I just want to build my new BSB! ("new" as in rescued-from-friend's-unwanted-LEGO-assortment, that is.) So, anyone willing to send me some photocopies? Colour would be great, but black and white would be fine. Just a note - they need to be the 6285 instructions, not the 10040 Legend re-release, as I've heard the re-release has slightly different parts and instructions (but please correct me if I'm wrong on this). I have no idea what the going rate for photocopied instructions is but I could probably find something suitably useful in my aforementioned assorted LEGO to trade for them. (The BSB instructions would need to be mailed to Brisbane, Australia.) Help and/or requests welcome... Thanks ~Zenithfleet

I recall Jake saying something about it being new LEGO policy to supply the minifig heads and torsos separately. What with the expenses-trimming and all, it's apparently one of the many little quirky things they've discovered in the manufacturing and packaging process that people have done for years without thinking (in this case, putting the heads on the torsos) but that turns out to be a surprisingly significant expense (timewise, I suppose). Think it was in one of his blog posts, but not sure. Too tired (ie, lazy) to go hunting for it now, sorry >-|

A quick infobite on the Lego scene in Japan (where I'm currently living): Sets are expensive, but slightly cheaper here than in Australia (my home country) according to currency converters like xe.com. Of course I have to pay to send them home but since I have spare space in my boxes and Lego's not too heavy that's no problem (books, on the other hand... ouch). Actual prices vary wildly, with Toys R Us offering the best deals I've seen so far, especially on the buckets o' bricks. I can't remember the figures off the top of my head though. A couple of stories from the other day at the Toys R Us aisle (a whole aisle, both sides, just for Lego! Like the old days! And most of it was Designer and City stuff. Plus the Star Wars stuff over at the big Ep III toy display section.) One: a couple of boys stopped at the Millennium Falcon, looked at the price and one said, "geez, for 20,000 yen who the heck is gonna buy that?" (I translate liberally :) ) 20,000 yen is roughly two hundred US dollars or less... about $240AUD. Two: a mum and her little daughter saw the Designer Building Bonanza set on the shelf and decided it would be great for the kid's older sister, but were a bit ambivalent about the price. I did my helpful stranger routine and suggested the Blue Bucket (cheaper, and comes with two minifigs, plus I at first thought the little daughter was the one receiving the set rather than the absent older sister). The mum shrugged and said the older sister didn't have any figs and didn't care about them anyway. They decided on the Building Bonanza :-D Anyway, for me, with a history of plastic-kit model collecting, Lego seems blessedly cheap :P After all, I can get a 3000yen model kit that I build and then paint (extra cost for the brush and paints of course) and then sit on a shelf somewhere, or maybe use in a wargame if it's suitable... or I can get a 2000yen Lego set I can rebuild a hundred times and then add it to my brick collection, or give to my li'l cousins to play with, who might then pass it on to their kids one day. Plus minifigs are inherently humorous :D

That is a pretty dodgy lookin' dragon. Wonder why TLC didn't use the Bionicle-style dragons from the Vikings set? The more I think about them the more those seem the ideal use for Bionicle pieces in a System set, for maximum poseability. Maybe TLC just wants a solid chunk of plastic the li'l chibis can't break |-/

Ah, rightio then. Thanks for taking the time to confirm that. I bow before the immortal wisdom of phes' avatar, aka Serge the Seal of Death. By the way, were sets ever made of the Terrorcons? I would imagine so since they formed into a five-parter, Abominus or something such. Never saw them in Oz - my only knowledge of them came from a couple of episodes on video at the local rental shop - but they were always among my faves (who wouldn't love two-headed transforming chrome dragons?) And to throw things open to everyone else, what were your favourite a) Transformers toy lines and b) series? Personally I swear by The Movie to this day *glasses* "Your bargaining posture is highly dubious" :^D And just to show I'm not totally ignorant of Transformers trivia: Almost-Interesting Factoid No. 1: there were two intros for the movie, right after the title appeared - in one, which I remember from my childhood, blue text scrolled up the screen Star Wars style explaining about Unicron and the Autobot-Decepticon war. The other intro, on the modern DVD release, has voice-actor credits flash up on screen instead. Almost-Interesting Factoid No. 2: since the animation was done in Japan, some extra stuff was done during the work-in-progress, showing Autobot City fully-silver and firing all its weapons at the approaching Decepticons, and a bunch of other shots of Autobots running aimlessly from explosions, and all this was shown on the ridiculously long Japanese preview. It's one of the DVD extras I think.

Had a look on Peeron just now, I was over there looking up Town minifig torsos actually (found some retro-looking torsos I thought might be rare but it turns out they showed up in a Train set a few years ago, oh well). Anyway, Peeron distinguishes between Firing, Non-Firing (the crossed-cannon logo ones) and Disabled, and notes the US differences, but not other countries' differences. Whether this matters to anyone is another issue |:| Good grief... does this mean the Legend re-release of the BSB had the Redcoat logo on its cannons...?! *wacko* (I suppose they might have been nicked off some hapless outpost.)

Really? Predators? Weird... I always remember them as Predacons, because when Beast Wars came out I remember being surprised that they'd re-used the name. Although I do recall the other Predacons you mention (had that lion one...) Oh well, for me it was always about the Aerobots and the elusive Terrorcons *glasses* As another off-topic aside, the fighter jets had some sort of flip-down transparent panes on their undersides that were supposed to fit into the big tank's missile (which you could look through) as a kind of targeting system, but I could never figure out how to make it work... baffled me for years 8-| But back on-topic, which sets did the crossed-cannon cannons come in? *wonders if he can be bothered doing a search on Peeron*

I think everyone's missing the point of the Merpeople set. It is quite obviously a feeble disguise for the first new Aquazone set in years :P Seriously, that ruin (minus the figs) would make a great add-on to an Aquazone setup, especially with the octopus and jellyfish, and considering the fact that the Aquazone fellas never had anything to explore but each others' undersea bases. Maybe Town/Divers too, although it's the wrong colour scheme for that. And that graveyard screams fantasy Castle :-D Finally, a home for all those old glow-in-the-dark ghosts... Edit: Oh, and that mermaid will find a loving home in my Pirate sets, once I swap that breastplate and weird head for a proper Islander babe *wub*

*cabin boy looks up impudently at old deckhand* Now why did that repeat post with that big time gap happen there, mister phes? *ducks freshly spliced mainbrace* So that's what one of those looks like. Anyway - There's some high-res, big photos of the new HP sets posted over in the LEGO Theater subforum, and I may be mistaken (I'm not *absolutely* sure about that photo) but the new Harry Potter Goblet of Fire Durmstrang Ship looks like it has a brown (with grey trim) 4+ Pirates hull... ...and it's a minifig-scale ship, so it comes with freebie parts for a Treasure Galleon MOC! Even if the bits are of a wizardly nature. ("Yarr, curse my wizardly bits." :-D )

I recall a Transformers line (sometime between Gen1 and Beasties / Beast Wars) that featured firing guns as a selling point. Turbomasters (cars) versus Predacons (fighter jets, and a big tank with an 'uge rocket on the back), and they had tubby barrel-shaped guns that fired little yellow plastic torpedoes about two to three centimetres long. Don't know if there were ever any regulation issues with these. All you Transformer nuts out there can fill out the details for me, I'm sure ;) As for Pirates, well, as a kid I never really saw the point of the firing cannons (standard in Australia) anyway. After all you couldn't knock a wall of bricks down with one unless you built them REALLY lightly. Although you could ping a parrot off the couch with a well-placed hit of the palm tree top. Unless your objective was to shoot them at your siblings (which thankfully my li'l bro and I tended not to do 'cos we were under deep behavioural brainwashing, er, I mean because we were extremely considerate 8-| ).

Thanks everyone for the welcome :D I've been lurking on LEGO forums for a while and been impressed by how... friendly everyone is. If this is what building with small plastic bricks does for people then the UN should have big buckets of LEGO at every diplomat's desk *satis* One reason that post is so long is because I'm a writer and once I start writing something it's hard to stop :o Thanks for those Bricklink links too, I'd heard about a place called Brickbay a while ago and couldn't find it and didn't realise it had changed its name. I'm going to do an inventory on the BSB tonight, from memory I think the ship's wheel is missing too but most of the other bits are there (like those yellow flower thingies on the stern). No instructions on Peeron (is that because it was released as a Legend, thus it's currently under their three-years-old-or-less ban?) but I'm sure I can flog them off someone, or photocopies anyway. Yo ho, yo ho... "shiver me timbers, Captain Rat!"...

G'day, I'm Zenithfleet. As you can see in the corner. Er. Yes. Well then. I suppose you're all wondering how I came to be here? No, really, you are aren't you? I'm going to natter on aimlessly anyway, you realise, so you might as well come to terms with it *twisted* I love reading other people's how-I-got-back-into-LEGO stories, anyway, so here's mine. Be warned: it's very, very long. To cut to the chase: over the last couple of weeks, I seem to have exited my dark age. I didn't even know that term a few weeks ago, and the first time I saw it thought it meant "the years someone spent obsessed with LEGO Castle" :P It's been fascinating, browsing LUGNET, Eurobricks, Brickshelf and all the other community sites, learning about the perils of BURPS and the importance of stickers and why everyone seems to despise Ice Planet. (I have all the sets *sniff*) But I should begin at the beginning: I was born in 1983 (told you I'd begin at the beginning) and it was around 1987 that I really started to get into LEGO. I had a bit of Duplo and a few random tiny Classic Space sets like that one with the grey android, but the first big, significant, life-changing set I remember receiving was the 6932 Stardefender 200 (or the Tri-Sec, as it was known in Australia - that's another thing I've been bemusedly learning about lately, all the wacky US names in common use in the community groups. The Aussie names were rather staid and restrained in comparison, at least until around 1996 when the UFOs arrived and the catalogues started jabbering about Terra Tomahawk Tracers and suchlike.) Also got a package of four grey crater baseplates (I was five or six years old, and was disappointed to discover that all the cool ships shown on the front of the box weren't actually inside... but a brilliant long-term present nonetheless). 6932 had enough parts to build a decent little moonbase on those baseplates, and to this day that beautiful modular ship with its vast array of weapons (well no-one said they were weapons, but of course that's what I decided they were) and amusing lack of pilot controls in the side pods is, for me, THE classic LEGO spaceship (my personal equivalent of the Galaxy Explorer and its ilk). I was just old enough to grab quite a few Classic Space, Futuron and Blacktron I sets, but was soon distracted by the arrival of Pirates. Throughout my childhood Space and Pirates were my favourite themes. Pocket-money power came into play around the era of Blacktron II and M-Tron, though I never seemed to have enough to buy anything substantial for Pirates, making do with the parts-limited but brilliantly playable 6270 pirate island and never having more than three Soldiers to brave the hordes of five-dollar mini-pack bosun pirate reinforcements. For Space, Ice Planet was the first to be seized and devoured by my brother and I with our Canadian-holiday spending money (which we saved up until the very end of our stay and then bought every single set in the subtheme as well as a couple of Spyrius sets. Ah, giant robots versus sleds, good times...) I thought 1993 was a pretty awesome LEGO year at the time but now, looking back, I wonder if it wasn't when things started to go wrong... the Dragon Masters brought fantasy into Castle with a drop in set design sensibility, and Ice Planet was the first Space subtheme with parts and colours of little use for other subthemes (all that trans-orange and snow-visor-ness). I stayed interested in LEGO for a few more years, grabbing all the Spyrius sets and the Exploriens, plus adding the 6268 Renegade Runner (Seastar) to my Pirate collection and thus fulfilling a long-cherished childhood dream of actually having a ship for my pirates to cross the living room carpet on and do piratical things rather than hanging around on that island throwing spare cutlasses at the Islander crocodiles to stave off boredom... but I drifted out of touch with the LEGO scene after 1997 when those daft Insectoid things feasted like flies on the decaying corpse of Space, Star Wars slammed the lid on further original sets in that theme (something about LEGO SW just seemed disturbing to me at the time... it was the first of the licences after all) and all the while nasty things were happening to Castle in the form of the Fright Knights and Pirates sank to Davy Jones' locker (don't know who Davy is but he sure has a lot of cannons and bandana hats down there that I want back). I was a teenager, anyway, and "now I am a man it is time to put away childish things". Last year I discovered C. S. Lewis' addition to that quote: "...including the fear of being childish and the desire to seem grown-up". I nearly came out of my dark age in 2003. Despite the travesty I saw on the shelves at the supermarket toy section, some mildly nostalgic trawling of the internet turned up something awe-inspiring: the 6285 Black Seas Barracuda (forever branded into the memories of Australian 80s children as the Dark Shark- I think there's a Town smugglers' speedboat with that name in the US, but we had it first! *satis* ) was a Legend! And at half the price it was back in the classic days! This was the ship, you see, that my best friend owned, but that I never saw complete because he lost the instructions, and that I lusted after for years - I ruined several old catalogues with drool as I recall. After an agonising struggle ("what would I do with a LEGO pirate ship at my age?!") I turned away from the chance to relive my childhood. I thought it was the best decision at the time, and it was - I was going through uni without a proper job and had absolutely no money for stuff like that. This year, though... I've been in Japan, teaching English, living frugally, and had money to burn for the first time in my life. I watched "Pirates of the Carribean" with some friends and got all nostalgic for Pirate LEGO (not to mention the "Kettle-Ship Pirates" book I had when I was a wittle wun, with a photo of the writer's handmade model of the storybook ship in the back of the book... hmm, maybe that was when all the creativity stuff started...). I did some research on the Net, was disappointed to find the BSB discontinued *again*, but brightened up when I stumbled upon the tail-end of the LEGO revival and "back to basics" company policy saga, and REALLY cheered up when I saw the Designer sets. In particular - 4886 Building Bonanza. I haven't wanted a LEGO set like I wanted that one in a long, long time. And it was Town! (in potential anyway). Madness! Sacrilege! I bought it. And I built it. And I rebuilt it. And I made a lighthouse out of it, and imagined it shining out at the entrance to a Soldiers' cove while my Pirates glided through the dark waters unseen below. And I made a castle out of it. And I remembered that a family friend in Japan had a pile of old Castle LEGO in his attic. And I asked him if I could buy it from him and give some to my li'l cousin, who lacks fine motor skills and plays too many video games. And he said I could take it free. And thus I found myself, for two days, sitting in my room sorting LEGO elements from die-cast train carriages, glass elephant ornaments, broken giant robot toys and the Dreaded Gooey Sweet That Some Kid Left Opened In The Box Seven Years Ago that had coated mostly everything in unexpected patches of brown sticky glop. *sick* I found some melted LEGO pieces in there, too. Ever seen a melted LEGO piece? I tell you, it ain't pretty. (The friend's father, when I mentioned this to him, immediately said the damage must have been due to heat in the box during storage, and definitely not caused by an actual flame, for example from the cigarette lighter I also found in the box. Hmm.) Then it was time for washing, sorting by colour (not the best for building, but the easiest for packaging up to send to Ostraya) and best of all, discovering that this bloke had once owned the BSB. And still had the hull. And the masts. And the rigging. And was missing two sails. Damn. (Anyone got advice for finding replacements for those red and white cloth sails?) I've yet to do an inventory from Peeron, since the printer's run out of ink, but I think most of the other elements are still there. Lots of Castle lego in the box, too - I'm fairly sure he had the 6086 Black Knights' Castle, and a bunch of minifigs from classic to Fright Knights. I spent an entertaining evening sorting them and grouping them, even the lone Black Falcon with extra-shield-carrying attendant who I've decked out with all manner of finery and decided is a monarch in exile with his loyal retainer, roaming the land after the demise of the BF realm and swearing incomprehensibly at anyone wearing dragon heraldry who passes by. For the first time in my life the lure of the Castle is strong... Rather surreally, some of the LEGO in this collection was apparently passed to my friend from his older cousin - there's a Police Boat hull in there from 1978 (the very first floating boat!) and a mid-80s push-along red locomotive with an ALMOST complete circle of track (aaargh). LEGO lives forever! And if you leave white bricks in the sun too long they go yellow and if you wait thirty years you can build your very own Classic Yellow Castle!!!... er, time to take my meds, excuse me... So here I am, awed by the Designer sets, longing to buy that Ferrari Truck set but trying to hold off until I get home to Oz (Town sets again, what is is with me and these Town sets all of a sudden? I never *liked* Town as a kid!), scouring the house for more old LEGO bitz... and looking forward to getting a Viking set or two (I didn't like the Bionicle dragons at first, but after playing around with the three green almost-immobile dragons I found in the box of bitz, I'm much more amenable to monsters that can actually pose and move... my Dragon Masters will need some *real* beasties to boss around.) And some of this newfound LEGO will go to my li'l cousin (he especially likes the Star Wars stuff), and some of it will go to me, muhaha. I'm out of my dark age. Pleased to meet you. Any of you still reading this, of course. :-D ~Zenithfleet