Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/13/i-know-a-kid-who-will-be-build.html
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10/10 do want! Especially if it comes with minifig Scott Kelly and minifig Samantha Christoforetti (in TNG Starfleet uniform!)
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And pair with this:
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Do those single-stud figures still count as minifigs? They’re tiny.
No, LEGO calls them ‘microfigures’.
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I miss so much the old (Jimi Hendrix was alive and well) Lego and Meccano boxes with generic pieces, the ones you could use to build approximations of pretty much everything.
Unfortunately greed and the need to sell one more different box every Xmas or birthday won, and today we have wonderful kits to make one and only one object. Want to make a different thing? Buy another box!
Those are just 3D puzzles, wonderful puzzles indeed, but as a gift for kids I’d rather think of something that would stimulate their creativity.
My 11 year old nephew received the lunar lander kit. He did about half of it and then got bored. But to add insult to injury, he didn’t let either of his millennial aged uncles work on it in his stead.
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I looked at the reviews on thst page, one mentioned that it’s significantly cheaper direct from lego.com, and it turned out to be true.
https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/international-space-station-21321
(£64.99 vs £92.99 on that amazon link)
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My 6 year old son decided to spend some of his Christmas money on this. We warned him that it was rated for 16+, but obviously he wasn’t deterred. Due to some other things going on we parsed it out over 4 days. I’d say it roughly took him 6 hours and he never asked for help. The adults did do the stickering however. It’s a pretty cool set for fans of realistic space stuff.
I know Lego makes some basic sets that build more generic things, but I understand your sentiment. Looking at the sets my son has compared to what I had +30 years ago the biggest changes I see is not the sets themselves, but the specialized pieces. Digging through his bin I find piece after piece specific to a certain set. That’s not to say you can’t use them for other imaginative builds, but they certainly aren’t generic.
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Is there a SpaceX dragon capsule available? The space shuttle is so 2011.
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4 days isn’t bad. The real thing took what 15 years?
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Most Lego sets are still mostly generic pieces. Lego introduce probably less than ten ‘custom’ parts each year, it’s just that after fifty years, that adds up.
Sets like this ISS model make great use of all the weird bits they’ve made over the years. For example, the micro-figure astronauts were originally an Oscar (done in ‘gold’ plastic), now in white, with a pattern printed on. I mean, I’m looking at my ISS kit now, and I’m pretty sure I could have built it in the 1980’s (if my parents had bought me every Lego set I wanted).
There was a time when Lego only made “plain” blocks, and it was over by the 1970’s.
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Yup. I was an early 70’s lego kid and although they were generic pieces, you had a design to work towards which was the way of getting the hang of design. Later, after you’d make whatever was on the box, you’d tear it down and make whatever took your fancy. That was a different kind of fun.
(Holy crap - some google-fu and my childhood is revealed! This was my first lego set.)
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It would be nice of the solar panels actually did something. Like charge a battery for lighting at night.
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Thanks. Notice the same looking up the set in Germany.
I’m actually old enough to remember the original Lego “figs”, before minifigs took over as the default size.
Me too! I remember my first minifigs, in 1977(ish).
[Edit: Wiki says it must have been 1978.]
Lego is plastic, right? Certainly, they’re durable and a drop in the bucket compared to pallet wraps and layers and layers of shipping materials, but you’d think we wouldn’t need to keep making more basic bricks over the decades. My neighborhood has little libraries for books on mailbox poles; I want a lego library beside each one.
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