AndyC

It's a widely known fact that the "Legends" re-releases didn't sell particularly well. They received a lot of criticism for changes that had to be made to deal with parts/colours that had been discontinued etc. And ultimately it put them in competition with the second hand/MISB collectors, who were selling the 'original' version which is what the people who wanted the set were always going to prefer. As to the OP's question, it's tricky because the logistics involved in set production are a lot more complicated than you might imagine. So TLG will have roughly attempted to estimate the quantity of any given set that they can sell and planned production around that. There may be some scope for changing scheduling to fit in another production run if a set is selling significantly better than expected (or to cut short production of one doing badly) but generally not (the aim, after all, is to have production planned to run as close to 100% of capacity as possible)

Been there, done that. http://www.brickset.com/detail/?Set=8633-1 ;-)

I'd have thought a bigger problem (literally) would be that the Lego pneumatic parts are quite sizable and would need a fair amount of room to operate I'd have thought. It'd certainly be cool to see someone try though.

I think that looks better, although it's still two moulds, not one, since alternating rows of bricks would need to be reversed to work the way you've rendered them.

Brilliant. Quite tempted to try building one of those First ones in real bricks. Seem to spend enough of my life missing them that it'd be handy to have my own.

Eyeballing it, the box for the 10030 UCS Star Destroyer is bigger though I don't have a tape measure handy at the moment to actually measure the difference.

Gorgeous. The one thing I don't like about it is that I can't go to the nearest toy store right now and buy me one!

I'm guessing it's a cost thing, it's presumably heaps cheaper to vary the box print design to include details of the latest offer rather than having to have machinery to place some special offer thing inside the boxes.

Surely if you allow the bricks to be placed at arbitrary angles you've basically got an infinite number of combinations, even with just two bricks?

The actual Bluetooth receiver chips themselves aren't nearly that expensive, you can get them for a couple of Euros each without even buying in bulk. The custom molded casing is probably considerably more expensive. I still think there'd be much more call for a simpler, smaller device that could be produced a lot cheaper and would probably sell in bigger quantities too.

Two brick seperators. Basically put one underneath and the other on top then push the two seperator handles together and it'll seperate plates easily. Although, it has to be said, I think this worked a bit better with the older design of seperator than it does with the new ones.

The Portal one is quite interesting, because it actually highlights that having a large licensed fanbase isn't enough on it's own. How? Because there is a similar Portal project that has been on there for considerably longer and yet has garnered a mere 785 votes. I actually think the biggest issue with Cuusoo is that there are too many people who think all it requires is that you have an idea, stick it on there and it's job done. If you want a project to succeed you have to present a compelling pitch. You actually have to market your idea. Now that may be easier for a licensed property, because it's easier to target the right kind of audience, but you still have to pitch a suitably well thought through and well presented idea if you want people to pay attention.

Interesting to see the results, so many of these surveys seem to just disappear into the ether. Judging by the results I guess I'd fall roughly into the average AFOL bracket. Which is nice.

Imagine in your head exactly what a D2C version of that would be like, maybe along the lines of the Maersk set. Now reduce the piece count by sufficient parts to enable Batman to have a vehicle to go after the train. Then add flick-fire missiles to the engine (kids love them even if AFOLs don't) and perhaps some additional play features like an exploding engine and you'll quickly end up with something that'll not really satisfy those who want realistic trains, even if the design isn't totally out-there crazy to begin with. Things like Hogwarts Express are a classic example of this already, the design just ends up too compromised to fit everyone's wishes and remain in a suitable price bracket - most kids will tell you it looks like the Hogwart's Express, most AFOLs will point out it's a travesty of a steam engine design given the availability of things like more realistic train wheels from the Emerald Night and so on. But that's precisely my point, those who are going to do it are managing it fine already by buying multiples of big expensive sets that TLG is reasonably confident it can sell (or by buying parts of those sets from the second hand market, either way it's a sold set to TLG). There aren't enough people doing it in sufficient quantities, however, to make taking the risk of selling individual cars profitable, because the audience for such sets is even smaller than the already small train audience - kids just aren't clamouring for another box-car. Mechanisms that are better suited to niche markets and that can better sustain a higher priced model with a smaller audience, like Cuusoo and D2C sets are just a much better fit for what most AFOLs want from Lego trains. A PAB selection with more easily available train-related parts would be great too, although I think that would really need more competitive PAB pricing to have a practical impact.

Doubt it, the battery box doesn't provide enough power to drive more than two XL motors. What it might mean, however, is that you can drive two XL motors from a single IR reciever and get the full power to the motors, as it's been pointed out on previous occasions that you really needed one IR receiver per XL motor in order to do that in the past.

Which is entirely my point, it's catch-22. You can produce "Action" train sets, that are more exciting for little kids but then the AFOL train crowd just dismiss them as not real trains and don't buy them. Alternatively you can produce more realistic sets, which tend to have less "play" value, which satisfies the AFOL crowd but doesn't really grab kids as much. Neither crowd is likely to be pleased by either option. And it's not just TLG that has the problem selling train sets to kids anymore, it's one of those things that just seems to have become less appealing across the board (quite probably because kids are significantly less likely to travel by train these days). Except when they did try to expand the train sets line and offer a wider variety of options (the My Own Train sets) they sold extremely poorly. No matter how often AFOLs make the claim that they'd buy more carriages for X or Y if they were available, they typically won't. Or, at least, those that will are probably just as likely to buy doubles of the full train sets and just reuse/sell extra parts anyway which is a more profitable model for TLG. And quite why you think TLG would reduce the number of sets in other parts of one of there most profitable lines, City, just to make more trains that might appeal to AFOLs, I don't really know. As it is the City line has actually carried a remarkably large number of train/train-related sets and Lego train fans should probably be both pleased at that and investing in buying plenty of those sets, because those selling well is the only real way to convince TLG that selling trains is profitable.

You may not, but I'd put money on any of those being significantly more popular than some of the train suggestions in this very thread. I do actually quite like the idea of 'action' train themes, although I suspect depicting rail crashes so explicitly might be a touchy area for TLG, maybe you could get away with it with a cartoony type train in a Batman/Spiderman set - except then you'd probably see the same criticisms from AFOLs as you do about the Toy Story train, i.e. that it wasn't terribly realistic. Honestly I think moving more in the direction of the Emerald Night/Maersk train with more realistic trains sold through D2C channels would probably be a more sustainable approach to trains. And, as has been suggested before, if they could find ways to encourage stores that deal more in model train sets to stock them, or maybe even run occasional ads in train collector magazines, then that too might help to expose the product to a wider audience. Simply producing lots of train sets and just assuming they'll automatically be popular would not only be a bit foolish, but it actually goes against the history of what TLG have already tried and shown to be unsuccessful.

I think the W3C validator might disagree on that! Personally I don't care much, as I know the workaround, but the overall experience for users of Eurobricks would probably be better if one of the methods for auto-flagging the site as requiring compatability with old versions of IE were used, rather than relying on posts in this forum or just pointing people towards other browsers. Assuming, that is, there isn't an easy fix available for the actual forum software itself.

As much as everyone loves to blame IE, in this case it's because Eurobricks serves broken HTML to Internet Explorer. If you click the "This page is broken" icon in the IE9 address bar (just to the left of refresh) this issue will go away (IE will render the HTML the way IE6 did), as well as a whole bunch of other weird issues throughout the site.

The difficulty for Lord of The Rings will be whether stores are keen to stock it once the Hobbit movies are done and dusted. By and large toy stores are less keen to push licensed product that doesn't have an ongoing advertising push from it's licensor in the form of movies etc (notable exceptions being SW, which is and always has been a license to print money for toy manufacturers and, oddly, Cars, perhaps because toy cars have always been a quintessential part of childhood). If it turns out to be a massive money spinner that may not be an issue, but otherwise stores may prefer to let it slide before it reaches the point it's clogging their shelves. In contrast, Friends isn't similarly tied and thus TLG is free to change it as and when it wants. Given that it at least seems to have been a success so far, I can't imagine they'll be in a hurry to completely redo all the development work behind the line. And when you look at how long Belville sets were around, despite being considered largely a failure, it certainly would suggest that Friends could be around for some time to come. Personally I think they're both going to be around for some time yet, so best to just enjoy them both while you can.

Bear in mind, also, that the size of the wheel will affect speed too. One single revolution of a large wheel will move much more than a revolution of a smaller wheel.

I know many dislike it, but this is still one of my all time favourite sets. A word of warning though, be very careful when it comes to finally putting the big pieces together. Especially the upside-down greebled side. It's super fragile and quite tricky at that point and if/when you drop one, it's a bugger to reconstruct again (yes I learnt this the hard way!)

I was actually thinking of the fixed angle ones, the rounded edge ones actually need three parts, as you need a left and right version of the "pink" piece. It's most obvious if you look at how it would need to work on alternate rows - there simply isn't any way you could rotate a single piece to make it fit in both places.

I think those pieces are pushing the boundaries of being too specialised. Especially when you consider that to use them the way you're suggesting (both the angled corner and log bricks) would actually require two different versions of the 'end' pieces. As to the pipes, I'm not sure the "stud" versions are really necessary, as they can be accomplished already using the existing piece and a technic pin. The t-joint piece might be more useful, although I'm not entirely sure I've ever actually wanted to make piping like that before.

Evolution has nothing to do with the Big Bang, nor is the Big Bang pseudoscience since it can in fact be proved empirically from our observations of the known universe. Now what came before the big bang is beyond the realms of physics (all the current known laws break down at the point of singularity) and any one explanation is as good as another at the point. Even the Vatican accepts the Big Bang as fact (naturally it is seen as the moment God created all things).