xenologer

... I wouldn't mind some clickits, they have some nice transparent flower pieces perfect for those battle scenes in the methane rainforests of Titan...

Regarding the front wheels being way too wide. I think you've got the 'inside' pair of wheels on backwards, the red spacers are supposed to fit inside the wheel's indented side. I'll also say, that while this is a Very Pretty set. It is Cumbersome to play with, the 'pneumatic cylinder' pieces look good, but have waaay too much friction, which means you have to disrupt swooshplay to pick it up and pull them into position. the front wheels are all on a single axle, which makes rolling it around curves a little difficult; you can easily replace the Long Axle with a pair of 5.5axleWithStoppers, to enable wheels on each side to rotate separatly and have a pin connector on the rear wheels. This should make 'vroom vroom' feel a lot nicer on curves. I also think the connector hook on the cargo boxes is a bit hard to actually hook onto, a 2*2 plate with handlebar would be much easier, assuming 2studs holds on well enough. On the plus side, Green! and 6 of the new wheels.

OH, I forgot to mention, They also had the new Orange BinTruck (Garbage Truck) for 15$USD and the Green Container Truck for 20$USD and the Double Dump Truck for.... I forget, something costing more. I got the Container loading truck, because I can't resist heavy equiptment :-) No Mars Mission Yet though.

Visited my local Lego Shop in Santa Clara, CA, USA today. They had a new MiniFig PaB setup. Build your own minifig for 3$USD. apparantly, its a Limited event, but the manager told me that he was hoping to convince TLG to make it permanent. Basically they had a tray of dissasembled minifigs (apparantly from various recent sets) and you can assemble 5 pieces per minfig. - hairpiece, head, torso, legs, and an accessory Amazingly, one of the dissasembled figs (which I reassembled and bought) was the new Princess from the Castle theme. You saw her in the ToyFair pics captured by evil skeletons... Aside from that though, the rest seem pretty standard; But Still, they had female hairpieces and heads mixed in. So its a great way to help the 'gender problem' in your Town. ...I'm wishing I'd bought more than 2 women... I'll have to drop by again later, hope its still there. The did say Limited! Anyone else's Shop doing this? I sure hope it catches on as a permanent addition to PaB.

Well, how can you have a suspension without rubber bands or technic shock abosorbers? Are they just relying on bending the plastic?

The old version used rubber bands for the wheel suspension. I dont see any here. Whats it doing?

California USA Toys R Us saw the big Base set 100$USD, the alien Mothership 50$USD, and the ClawTank-mecha 30$USD Unfortunatly, I don't want Any of those, since theyre the big worthless ones. Waiting for them to get the Small ones or the Drilling Unit or Dropship. But who knows, maybe in a week or two right? its a good sign seeing any at all. P.S. They had the new Castle Knights Defence Catapult -or whatever its called for 10$USD -not my thing but... fyi..

As decorative statues you mean? ...or some bizzare ride... 8-

I wouldn't mind seeing the old City Space Port stuff again. Given the new direction Space is going with MarsMission, a crossover set seems like it might fit... Dunno if TLG likes to mix their themes like that though.

For people (like me) who don't need the entire set, but thought the truck was neat. Made this from looking at photos on the real one in xwingyoda's review Looks like, but definetly does not match the real one internally, since I couldnt see exactly how it was made and LDD has limited parts. But looks good nonetheless. The container should be exchangable with the real ones from the Port, this one has a mini farm tractor inside instead of a speedboat. Factory Link

Maybe once the sets are largely distributed, we could have a contest to discover the most innovative use of the useless alien figs? I'm thinking, that they could have simply recycled the ExoForce Drones in transgreen and they would have made decent aliens...

I'll admit that half the reason is pure desparation after so many years without any Space. Praying that it does well enough for them to Try Harder on the next season, till then the parts packs are always welcome.

hmmmh So now that we've established that there are no iconic printed tiles. I'm only seeing this as a parts pack mostly. Debating if I should buy or not. Looks like you get a few white angled wing plates, the big black slopes on the alien ship, bunch of technic beams that I already have enough of, the orange windscreens, some nice orange wheels... maybe, but I'll buy the smaller parts packs first. Ya know, I'm thinking that the 6wheeled rover in this set, ought to trade places (or at least undercarriages) with the 4wheeled rover in the alien fighter attack set. It would give the smaller set more substance; and in exchange for the smaller rover in the dropship, add a cargo box or something else it could carry. Both would be better.

I'm Dissapointed that they decided to use giant stickers to go on those giant slopes. Putting stickers on curved surfaces is highly error prone and I can see those causing trouble for kids. But I'm even More Dissapointed by the fact that even the Small 2*2 tile pieces (like the computerscreen, ?radars? and MM logos) are stickers as well. It is these small 'icon' tiles that give any Space theme its Character! They're small and common enough(vs the bigslopes) that the reusability argument doesn't hold much water. Especially for the computer screen, there is no excuse there!

Thanks for the pics I suppose the organge 'vaccuume' thing might be useful as ... maybe a 'warp core' in a MOC. I'm annoyed that they re-created the Trike, but did not also have a MonoJet set. This basically forces you to buy Two of the new trike to get an Even number of orange wheels. Yeah, its a conspiracy I say.

I have my doubts about ordering new stuff off the S@H website the last time I did this, my local Lego Shop had it on the shelf before my package arrived I could have saved shipping charges and waited less. Also, typically TRU gets stuff in even earlier than the Lego Shop itself. Whats everyone else's take on this? worth a pre-order or not?

Huh I guess they are on. They dont seem to have a Theme/Category page for them though; makes them hard to locate. This one's folding wings gimmik... I'm actually kinda liking as far as gimmiks go http://shop.lego.com/Product/Default.aspx?p=7693 converts the alien fighter from a UFO saucer shape into a ... winged thing... I wonder how long till S@H US gets them...

Hmm, Limit5 with two of those dumper buckets each, you could have 10 total sounds like a good setup for storing small part... No Mars Mission yet tho augh, the Service Station looks good, except it has 3 minifigs, all men if it'd included at least one non-standard-smiley female I'd buy it... as is though, I'd rather just build my own from scratch.

Can you explain some of the background behind this set's creation? It looks like it came in a nice package ala LDD Factory... but as you said it was not created from Factory. Is this some special service TLG sells? custom set orders? or was this created and parts bricklinked, and packed entirely by private individuals??(AFOLs)

It's interesting, but I feel it is too small, the driver can't even sit up straight in there... I like the concept though, and think it would look great on a larger scale.

I don't think a creation needs to be complex to be sucessful. Sometimes simple and fun is... ...fun when I first saw that little boat in the harbor, my first thought was, ... I need to make a fleet of these little things too *y*

eheh silly me Your names are so... similar looking I got a little mixed up *wacko*

grouping them By-Theme is going to cause some problems for Space As far as I know there was only that ONE Ice Planet redhead... Oh, and thanks for starting this Pageant as soon as I saw it I went on ebay and purchased http://peeron.com/inv/sets/3403-1 cause I just had to have a Pippin Reed minifig (well, a variant, but we can fix the hair and torso later) ohwell, that set actually has 2 men minifigs as well... which makes my male/female ratio even worse overall....

One of these Hobbes? That really doesn't seem like it would pass official design review though. Since it takes up an extra (and special) brick, and the grille piece ends up only held on by 1 stud, which in general they don't seem to do much of... I was thinking it may be held on by a 1*1 brick and a 1*1 technic beam with 1 hole, so the hole fits over the snot stud... but they have a rulebook that says they arent supposed to do that. So that doesn't seem too likely either.. maybe xwingyoda will feel like simply showing us... a picture of the truck with the front plates removed would make everything clear...