SteamSewnEmpire

Ah, the fallback. Well, you are nothing if not true to form. I can only pound this into your head so many times: it makes literally no difference if a model is built or not. Moreover, it's like comparing a draftsman to a welder - so the little builder can snap bricks together. Bravo. I wonder what the going rate on such a talent is? If I pulled up next to the nearest 7-eleven and waved down an itinerant, do you think I could convince him to do the deed for sub-minimum wage? "Hola! Tu letrero dice que pintas paredes. Puedo convencerte de que construyas un modelo de Lego en su lugar?" The art is in melding design with engineering, while keeping proportions as true as possible to the original - not in construction. Period. End of story. And don't even begin to lecture me about making the thing run. There are only so many ways you can skin a cat - the internals of a Lego locomotive are not deep space rocket science; we're dealing with a dozen gears and a handful of motors. Achieving the proper shape and scale of the engine utilizing the extremely limited parts available is the challenge. Because the guts of these things only vary by degrees. Pardon me for interrupting your virtual Shangri La by occasionally voicing dissent to the prevailing mind worm that you'd so DESPERATELY love everyone to just choke on. Believe me: I'm not posting any more projects after this - you don't deserve it. You think I'm going to continue to share work when the Eurobricks oligarchy promote intellectual theft? Oh, excuse - he built it. It must be his idea now. But before I go, let's dig a little deeper on that notion of snobbery. You honestly - truly - believe that the fact that this one-post-wonder has cash to burn, but no ideas of his own, that makes his work superior? Well, to answer that, your words do speak for themselves, so it's unquestionable that you do. We'd better get on with condemning all the unconstructed buildings, I suppose; setting fire to the unpublished books. They're inferior. After all, all the hard work has been done, but somebody didn't hand over a wad of cash yet. What a shame. If the above constitutes trolling and elitism, count me more than contented to stand apart from the rabble who would celebrate perfidiousness - being considered a rogue by thieves and their apologists is high honor indeed. And if that is too many words for you, then let me make it clear: you are a bad person, those who agree with you are similarly bad people, and I don't want to share your company anymore.

God I hate Studio. Good luck recreating it :/.

I miss the rails and ties being separate parts.

Can we see the cab 'front?' Interested to see how you resolved those angles.

Some of the best space sets ever posted on these forums have hordes of custom pieces in them. --- I think the difference between HO and Lego - and part of what lies at the core of the 'purity' debate - is that in HO, you are trying to (generally) create a series of scenes that look as true-to-life as possible. By contrast, in Lego, you are trying to get as true-to-life as it would look if life were Lego. HO is attempting to mimic the real, and thus scratch building, gathering materials from the forest floor behind your house, chiseling rocks out of plaster, etc. are all not only encouraged, but celebrated - the end goal being to make the final product startle in its realism. In Lego, you're trying to make the final product startle... in Lego. Thus, the limitations in Lego become a part of 'the game.' Break the rules too much, and it stops being Lego. Basically, none of us would be playing in this medium if we didn't accept that the end result would be deeply flawed as a model that is representative of the real thing - nothing built in Lego bricks will ever 'be there' for any number of reasons: shapes, proportions, colors, minifigure limitations, dimensions of the bricks themselves, etc. HO is pursuing the real, and Lego - in many ways - the surreal. But I still maintain that, given how much Lego charges for this product, and how boutique private sellers on the web have been - for years now - picking up the slack for them, that they could do even modestly better in the parts department.

Yes, I can see that your model is inferior in several distinct ways. However, you can call the titan arum by whatever name you like - the stinky rose remains plagiarism. This is not a case of "I did independent research and just happened to stumble onto the same brick alignment as you in every complex geometric shape on the locomotive" - you took the screenshots I posted, hunkered down, and spent many hours laboring to copy my work, then conveniently failed to credit me in what turned out to be your first post ever on the forum. Just amazing how lightning just strikes like that, eh? I worked for a solid week to achieve that something that you conveniently stumbled onto in one try. Man, coincidences. What astonishing things they are. For all that, you fell short, clearly, in certain areas - such as the chintzy terraced downslope at the front of the boiler, and the way that the cab and the running boards don't actually align (having the cab 8w and the running boards 9w makes for a 9w locomotive, btw) - but, make no mistake: your magnum-opus-first-postus is the fruit of nobody's tree but my own. Cheers.

I don't even get a slight shout-out? All you had to do was just say 'thanks to Steamsewnempire for working out 95 percent of the body-shaping design, which I faithfully copied.' These forums. I'm done uploading projects. I expect people to imitate me - it's the nature of Lego. I also, however, expect credit to be given where it is due.

Kk thank you

You guys don't offer the regular, American bokpok with a large counterweight/blind in LL, do you?

Wow, this is glorious. Love stuff built to-scale and full hull.

That's definitely not spitting out the best price. Using filters on the page above, I managed to get down to around $650 at one point. Easy buy is asking $1,500+.

So, I have ordered from BL in the past, but I know I'm doing something wrong here. I successfully uploaded a parts list and got all my ducks in order on that end. I get to this page... ... and then hit auto-select. Despite messing with the 'USA' or 'North America' or 'Anywhere' toggles, auto-select keeps spitting out just outrageous sellers - people asking $5 for a simple 1x1 clip piece, or 2x2 plate, and stuff along those lines. As a result, the price for a 2,000 piece model that's largely composed of very common black and DBG bricks suddenly comes back at me at like $1,500 and $2,000. Moreover, when I hit auto-select, the silly thing doesn't even assign all my lots - I wind up with, say, 90% assigned... and I don't even know how to tell what pieces haven't been purchased. Clearly, auto-select isn't the way to go on this. But how do I proceed with manually selecting shops? How do I tell that I'm not, say, massively over-buying on a given part, or doubling up on those assignments? Previously, I had managed to tease out reasonable prices with auto-select, but it's obvious that this time, that's not going to be posssible. Thank you for any help.

Neat. I don't much dig (real) G-scale for a variety of reasons, but this definitely has a strong LGB vibe.

The problem - not to veer completely off topic - is that the Hyperloop is an inherently unstable system, requiring a depressurized state to work. I'm pretty sure that the Beach railroad just pushed and pulled with the air currents generated from its steam plant. I'm not a fan of Musk, and don't believe this idea of his will ever work. Were the tubes in any way compromised, the result would be a total, near-instantaneous decompression of the entire network, likely killing or seriously injuring everyone in it. Pair this with his ambition to build it within a significantly active seismic zone and... yeah. I think there's a reason he's sort of strategically shifted attention to SpaceX in the last few years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beach_Pneumatic_Transit Sort of. It worked, but it probably never was viable as a form of mass transit.

It really reminds me of the old pneumatic tube subways.

Yeah. Okay. I'm throwing you on ignore. I can hit up the teenagers loitering outside the library if I want to solicit sarcasm.

Okay, I really think we're kind of carpet bombing a notion here that I had very little intent on following through on. Like I said - my parents had suggested it. It's not something I really want to do. Frankly, I don't much like parting out things on Bricklink, and I detest the physical building process of Lego - it makes my hands hurt and my mind go numb. After about an hour or so, all I want to do is walk away. To be honest, there's a big part of me that sees no purpose in powering any model at all. I'm not going to suddenly wake up and become a social butterfly who wants to join one of these clubs where I might theoretically run the thing (I cannot even imagine going to a train show and standing around for hours surrounded by screaming children), and I'm not going to have the space to lay out even a simple loop of track in an apartment. The likelihood of me ever doing anything more than making a built locomotive's wheel's spin while I hold it is pretty close to zero. However, the idea that I would build and ship a product to someone for north of 1k without even testing it is... severely incorrect. I don't know what kind of person you're accustomed to associating with, but the scam has never been my modus operandi.

God I'd kill for a smoke kit like that in Lego. It gets particularly amazing when it starts draining out of the cylinders. Can you imagine doing something like this in our medium? I have to imagine that the piping would all need to be aftermarket, but I am still really intrigued.

Oh, this is lovely!

My parents say the same thing. I do often wonder about opening some kind of boutique internet shop where I do one-offs and people pay for exclusivity (like, this locomotive is 2-of-a-kind, and I own the only other). The problem, of course, is the overhead required to get rolling.

So, I priced out what it would cost to build my 0-10-2, and the 3 PF L-motors, 2 battery packs and IR receiver would be well north of $100. That's... a bit of a non-starter as far as I'm concerned (and clearly a result of continuing high demand after PF's phasing out). So... what's the alternative? I've read in multiple places that PU is more than a bit of a performance letdown... and I don't think the price is all that much lower. Is that my only option? Have there been any rumbles from Lego about rolling out yet another power system in the next year or so (in which case I would just wait on that)?

Just figured I would share tonight's project.

I think Lego is somewhat dogmatic about the idea that it needs to keep part counts limited; that, somehow, having too many pieces of too many types stifles creativity. There have been so, so many times when I have been designing something, and I said to myself "if only part XYZ existed; if only there was a VARIANT of part ABC that existed (like, why is it problematic that a variant of part ABC exist, yet they found it okay to make ABC in the first place?)." I always go back to the problem of the round tower in castle. People have been - for decades - building round towers with Lego. And, I'll be honest, none of the techniques utilized are anything but mildly convincing. You wind up with gaps with one, or no windows on another, etc., etc. Lego could solve this problem by introducing just a handful of pieces that would enable proper round tower construction (and these same pieces would almost certainly have an enormous application across multiple themes). But... they don't. Because... reasons? Because it would make things too easy? It's the same kind of logic at works with their "no guns but guns" policy. Guns are evil, but blasters are just fine. Guns are evil, but you can brick build a pump-action shotgun (and some Lego figures in a few of the Marvel sets have had these very firearms equipped). Guns are evil, but swords are fine. So are spears. And so are flails. And, hey, you know what? Scratch that. Only MODERN guns are evil - you want a smoothbore matchlock, kid? Or a tommy gun? Or what's clearly intended to be a Winchester rifle? Or a western six shooter? Have at it. But modern machine guns?! YOU ANIMALS. Basically, I think there's a lot of very hypocritical paternalism at work with this company, and it's not restricted to trains.

Interesting product.