deraven

Beautiful! My favorite parts are the brick wall, the split wood, and the fireplace. Great overall design, and nice photography, too.

Delightful. Love the ship (both the concept and design execution), and the pilot is great as well. I assume there's another faction somewhere that fly around in T-Cell blobular ships?

Lovely - the deck looks great, and I like the use of the old-school windows at the aft. Simple but effective detailing on the bow, too. Nice build!

Very nicely done - supported!

The magnet is really the only difference. I would just go with whatever is cheaper/more easily available to you as there should be no functional difference.

That's a nice improvement on your already great, compact MOC. Great build!

Clever, clean, and functional. Wouldn't have thought that would do the job, but I suppose with that relatively close spacing and Lego clutch power/quality I shouldn't be surprise. Thanks for sharing!

Nicely done! But will he be allowed to play with all of those ship sets as soon as he can reach them? That's pretty tempting! I assume you used a mounting kit of some sort that is out there for regular model railroaders, or was it something you whipped up yourself?

Welcome to EB, archi97d! You're never too old for Lego! Happy building.

Delightful! The ships are still great, of course, but the presentation here is equally excellent. Nice posing of the combatants. I like the guy rowing atop a single barrel. The way you incorporated the shark head is also clever and works well. Great build!

OK, I do agree about the wood chips looking a bit like there had been several accidents ( ), but I must say the builds overall are just great, and the lighting/photography is spectacular! The detail, depth, composition, and lighting of the middle picture are all gorgeous.

Lovely. The roof and blades are particularly well done. It would be interesting to see more of the internal structure (flickr link isn't working for me for some reason). Nice build!

Welcome to EB, Yann! Happy building (and English practicing)!

I think it's great! Nice to watch, and looks like it works flawlessly and at good speed. As others have said, unless you don't enjoy this kind of build I'd definitely like to see more of 'em!

Yesterday is was 47° C here, but that's normal for this time of year so thankfully we have efficient and cold air conditioning. When we lived without that luxury (but in more reasonable "hot" seasons, not summer in PHX) the best we could do was ensure we had airflow. Fans definitely helped, and on particularly hot days I would sometimes do a makeshift evaporative cooler - basically just drape some damp cheesecloth over the front or rear grill of the fan to drop the temperature a few degrees. Didn't really cool things off that much, but it made it more bearable.

Welcome to EB, Ingels! Good luck getting the Legocave reconfigured, and happy building!

Nick Wolfe's explanation says it pretty well - Lego makes a good deal more when you buy directly from them, yes, but in terms of absolute dollars there's no contest from the volume that 3rd party retailers do. If they could snap their fingers and get everyone to buy through them, they could potentially discount their final pricing and still make more money than with retail distribution, but that will never realistically happen. I did want to point out that your assumed numbers are likely pretty far off. According to their annual reports, Lego's margin is about 25%. Knowing some about retail and having had similar discussions in the recent past with folks more actively involved in the channel, a large retailer is likely paying 40-50% of SRP. So on a $100 retail set, Lego is likely selling it to the retailer/distributor for around $45 and making $11.25 profit, then the retailer has their own costs and mark-up to make their own margin. Lego's profit margin has been consistently going up each year, and that's due to a combination of volume growth, efficiency, and price increases, but isn't likely to jump drastically in either direction if other market factors remain stable. That means that if you buy a $100 set from Target, Lego probably makes $11-$15 (on the high side). If you buy it directly from them, they'll probably get closer to $50 (since they incur more costs to deliver to individual consumers, the whole difference won't be profit). So that's roughly 5-to-1, and I don't have numbers on what percentage of sales are direct vs. through distributors but I'd wager that 3rd parties sell far more than 5x the number that Lego does direct-to-consumer. Personally, if there's no better deal to be had via a sale or something, I'll but from Lego direct to throw them a bit more profit and get my VIP points in the process, unless convenience/urgency (like a last-minute gift or something) of picking it up elsewhere outweighs both those considerations.

Welcome to EB, Magical Duck! Looking forward to seeing your MOCs. Happy building!

Welcome to EB, Justin. Happy building!

Very nice! I didn't even notice the microfigs at first. Nice details and greebling all-around, and looks like solid articulation as well. The space buggy is a great bonus!

Yes to all of those. I think it's fun to see creative uses of things from Scala, Fabuland, etc.. As long as they're not being cut/modified that's purist. I think it might be a little odd to see boxes used in a MOC and I think you might get a little flak if you, say, used cardboard set boxes for internal structure on a large MOC instead of engineering something out of bricks... but we did get Lego instruction booklets used in The Lego Movie, so...

You've captured it beautifully, and the builds aren't overly complicated while still getting the feel right. Nicely done! I'd love to see something like this actually get into production...

Welcome to EB, Barthezz Brick! You've got some nice builds that are indeed very detailed. Looking forward to seeing more. Happy building!

It does look like a limited distribution set, but available from Shop @ Home in some countries which seems a little odd. Regardless, it's available for $36 to $40 on Bricklink. Probably the way to go (and definitely cheaper and easier than a road trip to get it!).

This is what I was going to say. The left one, but perhaps the grill plates in yellow or dark grey instead of black so there's not quite so much contrast but still some visual interest there.