AndyC

I don't necessarily think it needs unisex appeal, what it really needs is compatibility with existing System sets. A young girl interested in Belville was unlikely to want System sets, since they don't 'fit' with Belville, wheras a girl interested in Paradisa was more likely to buy into other areas. Giving girls more of a reason to get into core themes by creating a 'girly' aspect is probably a better strategy than trying to produce a single new theme that can please everyone.

You need to forget everything about the motor running at a constant speed and everything about the 4V, they may be true on a 9V system but they aren't for PF. Imagine we have a motor which runs at a speed of 2 rotations per second (for easy math purposes) when a constant 9V is applied. It also follows that, assuming no slippage, it will move at an average speed of 2c m/s where c is the circumference of the wheel. Now if we take that same motor, still applying the same 9V so the motor is rotating at the same speed, but having the motor on for half a second, then off for half a second. We will therefore accomplish 1 rotation of the wheel and, if we stuck to that pattern we'd get an average speed of c m/s (albeit a very jerky movement). Since we've only run the motor half the time, we can reasonably assume only half the amount of energy is used. We can get rid of the jerkiness by making the on/off pulses very,very short. We'll still only be providing 9V for half of every second, so we'll still only get an average speed of c m/s. The motor is still only on for half the time, so only half the energy is used. This is how PF controls speed. Now all of that is in an ideal world. In truth we'd probably need slightly more than half the energy to run at half speed due to ineffiencies in the switching etc, but it's a safe bet that we will, overall, get a longer battery life by running at lower speeds.

Good review of a nice little set. One thing though, this one actually came with The Sun rather than News of the World (the difference being NotW is a Sunday paper and costs £1 as opposed to 30p, probably why that had the minifig Jack in!)

Personally a model that's been glued or that comes without instructions would be worth less, but as long as I knew that in advance I wouldn't necessarily complain. I think the only thing that would really annoy me is if it wasn't made clear in advance exactly what I was getting.

That would be true if the PF system worked by varying resistance, it doesn't. V, I and R are all constant in a PF system. Everything is instead done through PWM, effectively varying the amount of power in the system by altering how often it is actually 'on' for over a very short period of time. As mentioned previously, the advantage of using PWM is that you don't have the problem of trying to dissipate excess amounts of heat energy as you would with a variable resistance arrangement. The downside is that you get a kind of whining/buzzing noise at lower speeds as motors are rapidly switched on/off.

I believe 'Maersk Blue' is treated specially as it's not available for general use by TLG's designers, it can only be used on licensed Maersk sets.

That's a very, very heavily modified Brickbeard's Bounty in Goldenmasamune's photos. The real set is much smaller and a lot less impressive looking than that. Of the two, I definitely prefer the Queen Anne's Revenge.

And the oddness continues. I got my Boba Fett keyring a few weeks ago and was perfectly happy with that, after all I didn't even get a Star Wars set, so could hardly complain about a free keyring and poster. So imagine my surprise to find a small parcel in the mail today from Lego containing none other than a Shadow ARF Trooper fig. It's like Christmas has come early!

Sounds about right, the UCS ISD was 1m long and I'd expect the Executor to be a similar length.

There are two versions of the trapdoor combo, the #30042 trapdoor goes with #30041 frame, the #92099 trapdoor goes with frame #92107.

Peeron can do this, sort of. It won't list all the sets you could build, but you can ask it if you have the parts needed to build a specific set.

It's good to see the genuine entries getting through this time, let's hope to see more great models from now on.

One option would be to take advantage of the way a worm gear will slide along an axle depending on the direction it's turning in. That should allow you to disengage an output that's turning the 'wrong' way.

Well you could certainly use one NXT and three push sensors and make three sound bricks in one! Not exactly easy to hide a NXT brick in a design though, never mind the cost.

Sets like 4958 Monster Dino fly in the face of that definition. It's Creator but actually has more Technic style building than many actual Technic sets. Creator sets are really about encouraging MOCing, much like old Universal sets were.

You can just "stack" power functions connectors by clipping them together and power will go to all devices.

One battery box can power several motors (officially 4x M Motors or 2x XL Motors), I've not seen a figure for how many train motors but 2 should be no problem at all. If you manage to put too much load on it the battery box will cut power to protect itself, so it's safe to try in any case. As for lights, the power drain from them is minute so you can add plenty of sets without a noticable effect.

If only life were that easy. I started (but for various reasons never completed) a PhD into trying to do exactly that. It's a really hard problem, even for relatively simple problems. There are certain programming paradigms which lend themselves more to parallelization but often they do so by effectively using a lot of extra CPU power to do work that might turn out to be unnecessary. We might reach a point where that's a worthwhile trade, but we're not there yet. And, believe it or not, LDD is multithreaded to some extent at least. Sat idle on this machine here, Task Manager is showing 19 threads in LDD. I suspect the problem is just that parallelizing the calculations for connection points and brick positioning is non trivial. And, let's not forget, the primary purpose of LDD is to make Design By Me sets and it's already possible to build them bigger than the Design By Me service can accomodate, so it's not like anybody within Lego is likely to see supporting bigger models as a priority.

I'd hazard a guess that it's because a 1x13 liftarm doesn't exist in White, at least according to Bricklink, so it's the only choice unless you compromise the colour scheme slightly by using a very light bley one.

Actually I was just meaning within Technic/Mindstorms/Model Team, though I notice now that wasn't quite what was originally suggested. On reflection though, I'd want MOCs to be the main focus, that is why we're on a forum in the first place after all. And I'm not sure you could really break MOC presentations apart from technique discussion. Hmmm, this is probably why I don't run forums, too indecisive.

Arguably every MOC is a Creator MOC, since MOCing is the very essence of Creator. It's always going to be the odd-theme out though, as you can't really pigeonhole it like other themes; things like the recent 5770 Lighthouse or 5771 Hillside House are very Town-ish, 5893 Offroad Power more like Model Team and yet 4958 Monster Dino was pretty much a Technic set. Spliting the forum into MOCs, Reviews and general discussion could work though.

It doesn't necessarily work like that, if operations need to be carried out linearly then multi-core won't help.

I'm not convinced that's entirely accurate; it's missing the colour sensor, for example, that was new to the NXT 2.0 set.

It's a tough call. Personally I do think Model Team has more in common with some of the larger Creator vehicle sets than Technic, so it does seem odd to have them split the way they currently are and there have been a few Model Team type MOCs posted where many of the comments have been along the lines of "why have you posted in Technic?" so I don't think I'm alone. However I can understand they'd probably never generate enough traffic to work as a stand alone forum and just lumping everything under 'Special' doesn't really solve it either. Ideally Model Team, Architecture, the landmarks like Tower Bridge and the Modular Buildings would be in some sort of 'Advanced Modelling' forum, possibly with Creator. Though taking the Modulars out of the Town forum would seem like a very odd split these days as a great many people consider them as all part of the same thing.

If you use the 1 1/12 pin (part #32002) rather than the pin with stud you're using it does work. I'm not sure if the original is a legal connection or not, but using part 32002 probably gives a better connection anyway.