AndyC

I think that's where we view things differently. I completely and totally accept the idea that, at a young age, children want to see gender seperation, because it helps them to understand themselves, their gender and what it means to them. And they undoubtedly play differently too, given the exact same Lego Castle sets a group of girls would come up with very different stories to those of a group of boys. It is important, however, that in letting children play we don't enforce dated stereotypes that limit their potential. To that end I really like the way TLG have included Olivia's Workshop and I hope they'll take this further to bring in a much wider variety to the Friends line in the long term. Are you joking? The Jack Stone figures were awful and accompanied by horrendously ugly and <insert that tiresome argument> builds, the Friends dolls are nice looking and accompanied by some of the best set designs TLG have done in years. The two things are light years apart. If this were another Belville or Jack Stone I'd be the first to critise, indeed I was initally very sceptical but actually seeing them my mind has been reassured. Duplo has been going for decades, I don't quite know where you're getting the idea that it isn't successful. Do you really think TLG have kept it going for fun? As for Bionicle, much as I dislike those sort of sets, it is unquestionably one of the most successful product lines TLG ever ran so isn't something you can simply dismiss.

Techincally you're probably right about reverse engineering. However LDD is provided as something of a courtesy to the fan community (especially now DbM is dead) and it's very clear that TLG would prefer people not to do this (I suppose it could assist those in the clone brand business) and I think we have some duty to them to respect their wishes in this regard.

Strictly speaking it's what TLG call "out of system" and is often referred to by AFOLs as an illegal building technique. There is a very slight height difference between the stud on the side of the brick and the hole in a Technic brick which means the top and bottom of the bricks are slightly out of line. The consequence of this is that using it in a model can place the bricks under undesirable levels of stress and potentially damage parts. It's unfortunate that LDD crashes when you do this, but the correct behaviour* would actually be for LDD to prohibit this type of connection entirely, so "fixing" the bug probably isn't going to help you anyway. *strictly speaking it can be a legal technique as long as nothing is connected above or below and it is only a single stud, but that's an extremely uncommon scenario anyway

There's an enormous gap between "theoretically could" and "actually would" wide enough to drive several trucks through. Even with things like SOPA, minor copyright infringement like a posting of a leaked image is a civil offence and not a criminal one, which means TLG themselves would be required to push for prosecution and is something they could theoretically do today anyway, but obviously don't because there are easier, cheaper and more publically acceptable ways of resolving such issues. Sites like Megaupload are heavily used for mass scale piracy, run by criminal gangs who are generating enormous levels of income from them and have long been the target of worldwide police investigations. It's unfortunate that the small percentage of people using such sites for legitimate material, such as Hispabrick, suffer as a result but it's also inevitable.

Well spotted chaps. Brickset suggests 6762 is just 6769 re-released and the Bricklink inventories don't have any blindingly obvious differences. I changed my post to number it 6762/6769 and marked it as a duplicate. I'd suggest we do that in the inventory too.

#30367 has some pretty complicated decoration setup, it's so the Astromech patterns (like R2-D2) can be painted onto it. If you want an Astromech head though it's probably easier to switch to the non-extended palette temporarily and swipe the pre-made version from there instead.

It makes browsing the forum on a mobile phone difficult and potentially expensive too and very rarely offers much benefit (certainly none that couldn't be offered by linking to bigger photos on an external site for those interested). It's not all about 56K modems.

6893 Galactic Starship - Theme: Space LXF File 6940 Alien Moon Stalker - Theme: Space LXF File Appears to be a collision issue with the 3475b rocket engine parts, needs a little investigation. Pieces left to one side.

6802 Space Probe - Theme: Space LXF File 6805 Astro Dasher - Theme: Space LXF File 6806 Surface Hopper - Theme: Space LXF File Seems to be some sort of collision issue between the tubes and the modified black plate, which oddly worked before the 4.2.5 update. Left the plate detached for now. 6807 Space Scooter with Robot - Theme: Space LXF File 6820 Starfire I - Theme: Space LXF File 6825 Cosmic Comet - Theme: Space LXF File 6848 Strategic Pursuer - Theme: Space LXF File 6876 Alienator - Theme: Space LXF File 6884 AERO-Module - Theme: Space LXF File

442 Space Shuttle - Theme: Space LXF File 452 Mobile Tracking Station - Theme: Space LXF File Wheels substituted. 462 Rocket Launcher - Theme: Space LXF File Wheels and hinge piece substituted. 483 Alpha-1 Rocket Base - Theme: Space LXF File Baseplate, hinge and wheels substituted. 497 Galaxy Explorer - Theme: Space LXF File Baseplate, hinge and wheels substituted. TV aerial omitted. 1498 Spy-Bot - Theme: Space LXF File 1968 Unknown - Theme: Space LXF File Black convex plates omitted 6931 FX-Star Patroller - Theme: Space LXF File Wedge with 4x4 cutout replaced by wedge with 3x4 cutout (may have offset some pieces a bit)

Not terribly easily. The best I can think would be to use the template feature to create a template for each individual brick in the PaB selection and then you could use the templates panel as a substitute for the part selector. I suspect that would get rather cumbersome though.

Ooh, nice MOD brickie! I too can't quite find the justification in those expensive green parts and have pondered building it in other colours instead. I was thinking of doing it entirely in shades of grey to look like a stone statue maybe. I think I might have a play around in LDD first though to identify all the bricks you can't actually see and maybe try a few other colours too.

6762/6769 Fort LEGOredo - Theme: Western (Duplicate) LXF File 3596 flag on pole missing (x2) 4071 2x6x7 door frame missing 4611 1x6x7 barred door missing

Really? Even though, in this picture, you'd have to be able to position a bow such that the point of the arrow would have to be embedded somewhere in the figs spine? Or is another mold of an unslung bow, just for when it's on his back, coming too? Will all sets include both a slung and unslung bow? Will there be arrow molds too? Isn't the "It's just a copy of the original poster and thus has a little artistic license" explanation looking even a tad more plausible yet?

7066 Earth Defense HQ - Theme: Space (Duplicate) LXF File Just the Alien's face missing (#95201pb02) and the unattached part of the flick fire missile launchers left seperate.

One more from me: 95201pb01 Face, Alien with Black Eyes Pattern (Alien Conquest Commander) - TLG's DesignID/Name for this is 96239 Alien Mask "NO1" How can the Aliens possibly conquer (virtual) Earth when the Commander has no face! It'd be nice if the other AC alien faces could be coloured properly too.

My assumption (and that's all it is) is that the PaB selection is likely to change soon (assuming it hasn't already) because that was typically the motivation for LDD changes, as the new DbM palette would be rolled out then. With DbM gone it probably made a lot more sense to no longer have to keep the LDD team informed of what the PaB selection was going to look like and so if it stayed as-is, it would have been out of date anyway. Putting any kind of intrastructure between the two services to allow them to stay naturally in sync somehow is probably beyond the scope of what the design team could risk given there was a fixed deadline that couldn't shift. I think a lot of credit has to go to TLG for continuing to invest in a product which not only generates no income but potentially competes with their core product line going in any way at all.

Well as I said it's one of those parts that was just changed slightly and when they do that TLG often just slowly phase in the new part as their stocks deplete, so it's possible whomever first did an inventory of it did get that part and then others got the newer one so it was added as an alternate. Or possibly the original inventory was slightly off and the difference in part not noticed, it's always tricky to be sure with pieces like this in sets around the time the parts change.

That may be down to the way TLG stealth introduced them, as they consider the parts effectively interchangable. Just to highlight the difference, here's a quick image courtesy of LDD: The red is the old part (2362) and the blue the new one (87544). I've also put a couple next to each other to give an impression of what the window will look like.

Looks genuine to me, the variation in style matches up with the slight variation in style between the original film poster images they're copying.

Cue discussion on the possibility of a new quiver mold that can somehow hold a bow in the right position?

They're side on to create the windows. The 4 wide pieces might do the trick, the only bit I'm not sure about is whether there is enough space behind the diagonal window once you have the others in place. Still worth a try if you aren't fussed about compromising the internal design.

There's actually a very subtle difference. The new part has small supporting walls at the edges to make the piece stronger, so when used as in Cafe Corner you'll find the windows look slightly smaller with a slightly thicker border. I'm not sure how much that'll make the design look 'off', but I'd be interested to see pictures once you've built it.

Odd as it seems the 96874 Brick Seperator part is actually in LDD 4.2.5, so you should be able to add it.

Well I think it's more a case that a deadline was set for the removal of the DbM service and the existing LDD had to be tweaked to remove those features. I suspect they wanted to retain some of the "ease of use" of the standard mode, rather than simply exposing the full Extended Mode setup and just picked a bunch of bricks to allow that. Any sort of more complicated redesign of the featureset probably has to wait for LDD5.