Legos, anyone?

[David Hingtgen]

5 designs are finalists, but only 1 will be produced---go vote!

https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/d955d940-972b-4401-b013-eb948fcb5a62

And if you're not sure, I highly recommend/request you vote for the carousel.  

[Scyla]

6 hours ago, David Hingtgen said:

5 designs are finalists, but only 1 will be produced---go vote!

https://ideas.lego.com/blogs/a4ae09b6-0d4c-4307-9da8-3ee9f3d368d6/post/d955d940-972b-4401-b013-eb948fcb5a62

And if you're not sure, I highly recommend/request you vote for the carousel.  

I cast my vote!

[Chronocidal]

So this is starting to get frustrating.  I'm starting to miss the older hinge pieces that didn't involve these clips, because it seems like every time I disassemble something using these clips, I find more of these pieces just cracked from stress over time.

Maybe an environmental impact from heat or light?  I don't know.  Fortunately they're not expensive to buy in bulk, but I've lost count how many of these have done this.

On the positive side, I was able to dig enough of those mixel joints out of my stash to rebuild the Shuttle's engine panel, giving me individually adjustable nozzles.

Which.. I feel a little bad ragging on the official set, but holy cow did they phone the shuttle in.

Edited 16 hours ago by Chronocidal

[Scyla]

7 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

So this is starting to get frustrating.  I'm starting to miss the older hinge pieces that didn't involve these clips, because it seems like every time I disassemble something using these clips, I find more of these pieces just cracked from stress over time.

Maybe an environmental impact from heat or light?  I don't know.  Fortunately they're not expensive to buy in bulk, but I've lost count how many of these have done this.

On the positive side, I was able to dig enough of those mixel joints out of my stash to rebuild the Shuttle's engine panel, giving me individually adjustable nozzles.

Which.. I feel a little bad ragging on the official set, but holy cow did they phone the shuttle in.

Lego might have gone down in quality. I had pieces from new sets that have almost no gripping force, fractures and now someone reported miss-molded pieces.

Also the stickers for the UCS Sail Barge I am currently building are cut terribly. I wish they would start include only printed pieces for those collector sets. The pieces will never not be a part of these sets. 

I don’t think any of may space pirates or castle sets from my childhood had any stickers included. I think the first set I remember having stickers were the 4558 train set and the technic 8880 super car. But those were some of the last sets I would get as a kid.

So far besides some generic control piece the Sail Barge contains no exclusive prints which feels cheap for a collector sets from a premium brand.

 

[Chronocidal]

I remember stickers in some pretty early sets (the very first shuttle launch set from the early 90s comes to mind, and those have long since faded to nothing), but also some nice prints from the same timeframe.  The ones that I always avoided were ones that bridged multiple pieces, like the first airport set, which had a large billboard sticker across several bricks.

I don't think I've actually used any stickers for twenty years or more at this point though.  I repurpose enough parts for custom builds that I just prefer everything clean of markings that would pin a part to a specific subject (even the UCS sets).  I've gotten to where I just love manually coloring things by the parts used, and tuning assemblies to get good color divisions.

One more note about the shuttle, I went on a dive into mods for the KingsKnight shuttle, and discovered there have been some pretty wild mods developed for it. 

Most interesting was one that re-built the bay doors with curved tiles rather than the custom door panels, and while it's a less smooth shape, it also removes the studs entirely, and looks like it raises the hinge to a more accurate height, allowing another layer of plates to shape the wing into more of an airfoil.

They also covered the underside with smooth black tiles, and covered over the retractable gear, which, while impressive, I'm not entirely sold on how thick it makes the entire shuttle.  I might see how expensive the tiles are to try it, but it will take a significant rebuild of the underside, and might conflict with the existing tank mounting points.

The one thing I would most love to improve on the base design though is to find a way to get the bay doors to fully open.  The pinned clips all pretty well limit them to 90 degrees, while they should open closer to 180, and lay down over the wings.  I'm going to attempt a rebuild with the studio later to see what I can come up with, but I'm not sure anything outside of the custom hinges from the huge Discovery set will allow that sort of motion.

[danth]

14 hours ago, Chronocidal said:

So this is starting to get frustrating.  I'm starting to miss the older hinge pieces that didn't involve these clips, because it seems like every time I disassemble something using these clips, I find more of these pieces just cracked from stress over time.

That sucks. That white piece has been redesigned a few times, supposedly for better durability, but now I'm not so sure that worked out. The ones you have there look like the newest design. The old ones had thicker clips.

6 hours ago, Scyla said:

I don’t think any of may space pirates or castle sets from my childhood had any stickers included.

They didn't, with very few, specific exceptions, like torso stickers on some of the 1978 sets.

I hate stickers and think Lego should print everything. Cobi, Mega, Funwhole, etc print basically everything these days so there's no excuse. I mean, I've heard the excuses that Lego PR shills repeat but they fall apart under scrutiny.

[wm cheng]

On 5/27/2025 at 7:32 PM, Chronocidal said:

Little late, but I think it was in LDD.  I know there have been some custom part update packs for it, since LEGO stopped supporting it.

Downside to the update would be the lack of actual windows, but I'm absolutely not upset by not having a cockpit with minifigures in it.  It's cool that sometimes they work out in the correct scale, but I'd much rather focus on a having as accurate a shape as possible, rather than being shackled to the existing stock of clear elements.

Since it hasn't been brought up here yet, I'm just going to say I'm really torn about this new set.

On the one hand.. I want to get it.  On the other.. the primary reason would be to rebuild it, because this design just upsets me in so many ways.

As a starting point, I'm not nearly the airliner aficionado that I know some folks here are, but this 747 has so many serious flaws that I can't look at it without cringing.  Primarily, the cockpit absolutely needs a redesign, but the placement of both the wing and stabilizers relative to the fuselage just bother me.

But the shuttle.. this hurts.  Mostly because it's almost dead on 1/110 scale, same as the Saturn V, and more importantly, the Ideas shuttle that got rejected.. and this design is so much worse than that one.  I do like how they used some ball and socket joints to angle the main engines, and I might steal that design for mine, but the rest is just a painful downgrade in so many ways.  It doesn't even look as nice as some of their City-themed minifig scale ones, and even using one of their old single-piece molded noses would have been an improvement over the weird half-octagon cone they designed.

I have gradually made a lot of tweaks and modifications to the original KingsKnight design, especially the nose and tail (the feature I'm most proud of, that thing is a SNOT jigsaw), but I also redesigned the wing to use the old-style notched wing plates, which let me give the wing a proper gray leading edge both on top and bottom.  Those pieces sadly aren't made anymore, but I'm certain something could be worked out using all of the new angled tiles they've made.

Funny enough, the original Ideas design was closer to the Enterprise anyway, since it left out the upper nose markings that I rebuilt it to include.

In terms of the set though, I know it's not historically accurate, since they just decided to replicate the Paris Air Show scheme carrying the Enterprise, but it feels like a lazy cop-out not to include the parts or stickers to pick one of the other shuttles.

They even missed a stupidly easy detail by not adding the upper windows on the cabin, or even a sticker for them.. which is specifically what that notch in the upper cockpit panel was used for in previous shuttle sets.  I know the Enterprise had those windows covered, but they were still there, and it would have made a very low-effort detail.

I don't know.  Maybe I'll use the points I racked up during the Star Wars sales to discount it and pick it up later this summer, but it's definitely a fixer-upper.  I could even use the stickers (yes they're all stickers) from the shuttle on mine, since the parts involved are mostly the same.  

I feel exactly the same way @Chronocidal - I feel they just phoned this one in.  I was so excited to hear about this one, I love official Lego sets especially their space stuff but there's so many bad shapes that I can't seem to support this set.  The 747 shape is so wrong, and my KnightKnight Shuttle is so much better than this one.