Diamondback

What's wrong with black? It hides dirt well and is rather hard to see at night... a very practical color. Half a zillion ninjas can't all be wrong! :P lol Shades of gray all around... OTOH, historical pirates you're talking a whole different story. ---------------- Now playing: Jerry Goldsmith - MacArthur - Main Title via FoxyTunes

Question: do entries have to be physical, or could I create an LDraw model if this contest repeats next year? (I'm still working on finding blueprints, so there ain't no way I'm gonna be ready in two days--heck, I've had most of my train projects in design since 2001 and none are finished yet!) ---------------- Now playing: Steve Jablonsky - Scorponok via FoxyTunes

Otters, the Century was the route of choice for the wealthy and powerful from NY to Chicago, and in the '50s it even exchanged sleepers with the Super Chief for transcontinental service. (I doubt Santa Fe woulda let their flagship train exchange cars with anything they didn't consider its equal...) Geeps, I've been in a full-scale simulator cab, and F's I've been inside the engine-room of a preserved unit. When I say "advanced", I don't mean at the hand-on-throttle level like modern desktop-controls, but rather in electronics controlling the engine, generator and power-distribution to the motors. (I actually have the Ops & Maintenance manual for a 60-series unit around the office, and am familiar with the E7 manual as well thanks to contacts at the NYC RR Museum in Elkhart and their library.) Essentially, all the '38 is is a downrated model of the 3000hp GP40--usually, in any model series there's a specific sequence for model numbers. Using the 40-line as an example: Zero: (GP40/SD40) basic model Five: (SD45) uprated, high-power derivative (note: SD45 added four cylinders, going from a V-16 645 to a V-20 645) Eight in previous series (GP38): downrated model focused more on switching Nine " " " (SD39): downrating for fuel-economy or range, seldom used aside from oddities (examples include SDL39: a GP38 body on a long SD45 frame and trucks with the biggest fuel tank that would fit, built for low-power but long-range use and GP59: hood-unit base model for Amtrak and commuter-lines' F59PHI) I'd say, for different regions, the Top Tier trains were: Northeast: NYC 20th Century / PRR Broadway Southwest to LA: ATSF Super Chief / UP COLA & COSF / CB&Q/D&RGW/WP California Zephyr Southeast: Southern Crescent / assorted SAL Meteors and ACL Champions Northwest: GN Empire Builder / NP North Coast Ltd / MILW Olympian Hiawatha Note: not a professional railroader, but I have many years of study into the railroad-history field--my specialties are '30s-'50s streamliners and Fairbanks-Morse "covered wagons". Actual road experience, I've rode shotgun on a little 44-ton industrial switcher, and been inside NKP 765 while it was disassembled for maintenance, along with "stuffed-and-mounted" cab-time in one of the last two NYC Mohawks and an SP Cab-Forward. ---------------- Now playing: Visual Music, James Hannigan and Andrew Sega - Sigma Space Suite via FoxyTunes

Nice review! Any chance of getting the part-list with part numbers and quantities? I'm thinking that little mini-cannon begs for a bunch more just like it and swivel mountings as an upgrade on BB and the Flagship... ---------------- Now playing: James Horner - All Systems Go - The Launch via FoxyTunes

I beg to differ--you've never heard of the Twentieth Century Limited? (Which has been described as "the most famous train in the world except only the Orient Express"... and archrival PRR's Broadway Limited was a close second.) There's a reason it's called a Road SWITCHER--the GP series was designed, as with its conceptual ancestors the BL2 and NW5, to have road-engine speed, power and endurance while still having the short length and high visibility in each direction required for a successful switcher, and from them evolved the 6-motor SD's, originally created for higher power at lower speed like drag-freighting in the coalfields. IIRC, the GP38-2 has almost double the power of the F3/F7 (they're pretty much the same aside from bodywork, and Santa Fe had all their passenger and dual-use F3s rebuilt into F7 bodies), along with much more advanced microprocessor controls. (Which was part of the Dash 2 upgrade-package.) Biggest problem is, if you need to check out an engine farther back in the power consist, you better keep a Spock Death Grip on that rail... on the F, ya got the bodywork to catch you, even if it is only plywood with a thin metal sheet on each face.

Actually, a real DeLorean is very angular, even blocky--about the only real curves are where it bends from the upper slope to the vertical section of the side, and then again at the bottom. ---------------- Now playing: David Arnold - S.E.T.I. - Radio Signal via FoxyTunes

I had a really nice head-to-head comparison of the prototypes, but a Firefox crash nuked it. Have to see if I can rebuild it...

Also, it helps to bear in mind that LEGO markets a little differently between North America and "Rest of World"--over here, you could literally gold-plate a turd and market it as "Rare, Limited Edition, Exclusive" and slap an insane price on it and you'd get some stupid rube to buy it for top-dollar. (How else do you explain so-called "Modern Art"?lol) It's that whole "Limited Time Only Get It NOWNOWNOW!!! 'cause it might be your only chance!!!" thing... "A fool and his money are soon parted."--??? "There's a sucker born every minute."--P.T. Barnum ---------------- Now playing: James Horner - Second Hand Copter via FoxyTunes

I've seen 'em listed on a collectible-toys site for US$125, which struck me as an utter crock of bovine-scatology. ---------------- Now playing: David Arnold - Aftermath via FoxyTunes

Executor as the entire ship, even if it has to be broken into three Venator/Impstar-sized sets to do it.

Typically, in the US market Toys R Us, Target and *gag*WalMart each get a few LE's where they're the exclusive Big Box retailer for 'em. (As in, you'll only find 'em through that store and LEGO.)

Even with a bushing "pusher" and the ends sticking out of the muzzle? I'd test it, but the only chain I have that I know where it is ATM means tearing apart the crane on Brickbeard's Bounty--which is currently keeping a boat secured aboard.

He's off to a good start--if I can ever find the old drawings I prepped and feed 'em into MLCAD, I was designing a 10-wide, 99-stud-long, four-9v-motor model of this behemoth. Two 3000hp GP40's on a common frame, with a 10% uprating thanks to that massive radiator section. (If you were like "Huh?" when I mentioned exaggerating GP40X radiators, basically imagine this thing sawed in half.)

Or, you could just try to stuff a 30104 chain down the barrel... may need one of the previously mentioned bushings down the bore for an impact-surface though.

If you're gonna try to design something that actually exists, get at least one diagram of it, preferably more. Then break it down into "key pieces", the things that make that item different from similar equipment. For example: GP-series diesels with numbers above GP35 in the US almost all look alike, aside from the GP40X's huge expanded radiators--so emphasizing, perhaps exaggerating, those rear "flared" radiators if you're building a '40X will make it more recognizable. Being accurate is good, but you're essentially building an accurate caricature, much as the Minifig is a caricature of a human being. ---------------- Now playing: John Williams - Airplane Fight via FoxyTunes

Not "what", "who": General of the Army Douglas MacArthur--my everyday look is pretty close to WWII khakis (it pays to look like you know your field, and how better than total immersion?), and I have both the corncob pipe and a reproduction set of his 5-star rank insignia.

YES! An accurate but minifig-ized UCS line of the "greats" of pirate history, both the pirates' ships and the ships that took 'em down. With historically correct cannon-counts, all firing of course... QAR would be ridiculously expensive with its 40 guns but seriously cool. Maybe Drake's Golden Hind and a Spanish treasure-galleon? Perhaps eventually a similar series of the great men-o'-war like Constitution, Victory et al.?

I'd be more likely to use LDD/Design by Me if it had access to the entire selection of parts in production (including the color palette), as opposed to "you get these ~1500 options and no more" myself. This is why all of my design work is done in MLCAD and none of it's been actually built... Right now, though, it's just another unused program taking up hard-drive space for me. Just my two cents.

Brickster, I wouldn't expect it to happen anytime soon--LEGO doesn't even make some of the parts I need anymore, and some were never made in black (locomotive) or dark-green (cars). Besides, any parts so treated would be ruined for future reuse. And then there's the cost factor: each single lightweight car (I only work in 10-wide, easier to work from prototype blueprints that way: 1 stud=1') takes as many pieces as the UCS Imperial Star Destroyer or more, and Old School heavyweight Pullmans would take even more--which means a complete 11-car heavyweight train, even if LEGO were willing to do a custom-run of all the required parts as a "special batch", would be insanely expensive. And then there's the matter of storage, as each car's an easy 80 studs long...

In a lot of early-war aircraft, yes. But many others you had to deal with various knobs to adjust the gunsights and fuel-flow and trim and... a lot of the space-combat scenes in Star Wars were basically "WWII in Space". Trust me, if you ever get the chance to sit in the cockpit of an F4U Corsair or even a B-17 or B-29, it's a real shocker at first how many different controls there are that you have to remember what they all do. Heck, just a Norden Bombsight alone without a plane attached would've been stupefying for a WWI pilot...

Or, you might look at the "South American" Indy and Adventurers sets for jungle background...

I've actually been considering something like this--once I have the diagrams I need to finish designing a 1920's heavyweight 20th Century Limited, if I can ever get the parts needed to build it, I figured a total overcoat of glow-in-the-dark paint aside from the windows and shooting under low-light conditions would do very nicely for creating a "supernatural" effect. Al Staufer wrote a short-fiction about a similar spectral train appearing at a grade-crossing in Thoroughbreds, his superlative book on the NYC Hudsons. (Tony, if you don't have a copy, I'd suggest you pick one up.)

Well said, sir. I may be cynical, but I still applaud the effort--the odds may be seldom in favor of gettin' what you want, but you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, and I think you've bullseyed this one... if Billund can be bothered to listen.

I never saw the silly thing hit S@H--does that mean this was possibly just a limited pre-release?

Correct--but I'm always looking for ways to boost the realism on things, like how I redesigned the wings on the Indy 7198 set to better match real WWII German fighters. (And, so modified, mine is actually more accurate than the prop used to film the movie!) I tend to try to look at a build "through the minifig's eyes"... and then see where the glaring historical issues are, and fix them. ---------------- Now playing: Carlo Siliotto - The Skull via FoxyTunes