mon-o-mat

Ok, I underestimated the location based sets for Ninjago, I thought that it was mostly "crazy vehicles" like it was definitley true for Exo-Force or Nexo Knights. When talking about story driven location-sets I was thinking about Indiana Jones or PotC (and also Hobbit and LotRs) where many sets were good for nothing but replaying that single scene from the movie. I have to agree with the second part of your reply. Making the Pirates and their ships unique characters would produce better sales than having that same Captain Eyepatch-Hook-and-Wooden-Leg and his nameless crew.

I would like to see such a thing too. The only problem I see with such storydriven things is that they also tend to be very short lived if not heavily vehicle based. I think this is a general problem with Lego this days. There can be dozends of vehicles in a theme that all will be very diferent in size, appearance and functions while landscapes or buildings are always quite similiar and lackluster to be fair.

I don't believe you could fit the speeder anywhere on a V-19 even when butchering the build. Much of the space you have inside the ship is filled with the swiffeling mechanism for the wings.

Could be. It would make sense considering the price. As far as I know the set is supposed to be in the 100€ price-range which is far to much for the relativly small V-19. Or the V-19 contains another of those small hangar builds that normaly contain the ammunition and so.

You could say that about the films in general.

Those are ball joints. Female on the arch and 1x2 male on the leaves. But I think it only works with the new ones, since the old ones don't offer enough movement.

This is something I already wrote in the Future of Pirates threat: We need smaller sheep hulls again. The old ones were only two knobs smaller, but the smaller ships with only one element in the middle still looked good, while with the ones right know basically only large ships are possible. But the line didn't only felt like half one, it felt like it was only done half-assed. Some small sets, so a new ship could be released. I tried to create a 'small' Pirate ship, in the spirit of the one-mast ships of the past. But it didn't got really smaller than Brick Beard's Bounty in the end.

Unfortunatley they still were way to small in the end and especially the Fort itself was missing substance.

Where can one find this new pictures? \legoleaks seems to be dead.

Great build! Wait: Is that a brown helicopter part as body of the ship?

Thx. The design of the large bases put me in front of problem indeed. They are supposed to be put together with the large ships without being dwarved by them. But I also restricted the piece-count. After trying some designs with much more rock-pieces that mimiced a raised baseplate I settled for the streched out design they have now.

I tried to create some small mocs in LDD that could be lego-playsets. So I not only went for the look, but also for playability, stability(as good as you can in LDD ) and a reasonable part count. This are the results: Imperial Outpost On his remote outpost the imperial soldier holds watch for pirates that want to steal the treasure he protects. The first 'set' I created. I orientated myself on the classic sabre island set(https://brickset.com/sets/6265-1/Sabre-Island). While I really like the look of it the part count is relativly high for its sieze with 210 pieces. (Also: I used the old palmtree) Pirate Raft Escape After loosing his ship the old Captain has to sneak past the imperial fortress with his raft to get his treasure to saftey. This set combines the mandatory Raft with a Imperial fortress based on https://brickset.com/sets/6266-1/Cannon-Cove. The mast of the raft can be flipped over by shooting at it. Smugglers Shack An Imperial Officer is coming with his boat to inspect the old Smugglers Shack. Will he be able to find the hidden treasure? Sorry for the bad lightning here I was testing some other rendering programms. Pirate Hideout There were many pirate hideouts in the past, that had some hidden part behind a skull. I tried a slightly different aproach with some plam leaves to hide a small biat behind. The treasure is standing ontop of a trapdoor, either to save it by letting it fall onto the boat or to let the soldier make some swimming-exercises. Pirate Lagoon This serves as the Pirate Headquarter. It has a small Jail for the Governor's Daughter and a lookout, a hut with a hidden place for some barrels and a house for the captain. And it is modular. All the small islands and bridges can be put apart and recombined quite freely. The Imperial Port. The Imperial counterpart to the Pirate Lagoon. It is the center of Imperial Power. Cannons, the Governor's House with a jail for pirates and a storehouse for all the goods and treasures. It is modular as well, while it has less modules. Treasure Island: The Pirates followed their Treasure Map to this ruins on an remote island. Now they have to discover it's secrets and find the treasure it hides. But be aware: Imperial soldiers are already on their heels. I wanted to do the typical hiddent treasure in some old ruins. Unfortunatly the rotational mechanism that hides the chest needs some space and makes it more blocky than I like. Maybe I will try to remake it as a bigger set later.

Could be a Republic Y-Wing since it is featured in Battlefron 2. But I don't know how good a shooter is as a source for sets, but we already had those battlepacks and it is known from TCW.

"Big Bang" meaning with a lot of media-support and so? I would like it if it would be mystical kinda like PotC with sea-monsters, native witches and ancient ruins. But not another tech/history mix.

It was time that we get a new Anakin minifig and starfighter after 5 years. Unfortunatley it is probably the same ugly build we had with the Obi Wan Starfighter. But I hope it will be an TCW Anakin(without cartoon-face) and not an AOTC one.

Yep, it costs more than the Republic Fighter Tank, which has much more to it. This is clearly a set that is sold for the minifigs and not as a great set.

Still no new pictures of the Geonosis Battlepack? Besides that, I am only interested in the Tatooine BP and Grievous Speeder, althought I probably won't buy the later since it doesn't seem to be good for anything but the figures.

I In my eyes the hammer doesn't offer much playability. The arm is to flimsy so it doesn't make much difference that the chisel part can be moved. I think it would be better if the rubberband would pull it down after being drawn back, like the pirate cannons. On the other side, the generlal construction is just as boring.

Flagship and Kahuka. How is it even fair for any set to go up against the IFS?

Am I the only one thinking that the new Mine looks much more European than the last one. It is more of an underground based mine and the new style with white helmets and orange suit also looks more familiar to me.

The 2012 wave was indeed a bit better, it had a better range of vehicles. This range is missing at least a bulldozer and some truck. The biggest machine looks like those things used for coal mining: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Continuous_miners?uselang=de#/media/File:BJD_Dresser_Heleminer_-_geograph.org.uk_-_768698.jpg

I noticed this with the AT-TE. If you look at pictures of it the gunner is a small guy sitting inside the turret. On the other side for the lego model, the gunner is standig out so much while the set is proportional to minifigs.

Does plus-sized mocs are probably larger than minifig scale. They often build the heads to fit two minifigs besides each other, like in the movie, but then they forget, that minifigs are much broader then the standard person. I don't know the exact scale or what currently is the canon size of the AT-AT, but a bit less than half a meter in size would be close to minifig size. What I like to see would be a series of nanofig scale models. Basically larger vehicles/small ships, as a highly detailed miniversion but unlike microfighters somehow in scale to each other.

Could be. It would make sense to support those heavy shock troops by some light flankers. But now I wonder why the FO deploys more AT-M6 than At-Ats.

Looks more like a storage crate. I mean it is some sort of octagonal? Cylinder lying on its side. It is definitley to broad(look at the mirror) to be some walker not to mention that it doesn't look like those are possable legs.