Yay Lego

[mmcirvin]

I got some sort of nasty short-term flu-like bug and was feeling crummy, so to cheer me up, Sam and Kibo got me an Apollo lunar module from the Lego boutique. I'd been feeling a Lego dearth in my life for some time, and this set's great; you can kit-bash it into all manner of surrealistic pseudo-1960s/70s NASA hardware and pretend you're on Space: 1999 and make the spacemans ride on it. A hearty thanks to all involved.

Comments

[jwgh]

Hurrah!

.jpeg! .jpeg!

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, last night I put together the official picture-on-the-box configuration that actually looks like an Apollo LM, so it currently just looks like the catalog image. I figure I've gotta do that at least once.

Having done that, I'm doubly impressed. What distinguishes the really good Lego kits from the not-so-good ones, and especially from Lego's lowball competition, is that the model is not just a curio for collectors, made of single-purpose pieces that can only be reasonably snapped together one way. It is not at all juniorized, as the Lego fans say. There are dozens of places here where they could have, without much embarrassment, chosen to represent some component of the LM as a single molded piece, but instead designed it as assembled out of six or seven general-purpose pieces, so that the thing is an honest-to-God combinatorically explosive construction toy (the various radio antennae particularly impress me in this regard). That is dedication, not to mention a conscious decision to damn the manufacturing costs. There are also a remarkable number of pieces that are just used as internal support to make the whole thing sturdier when assembled.

The ascent stage is a separate unit that can lift off from the descent stage, the dish antenna supports are articulated, and the landing legs can fold in like the real ones so that the LM fits inside the Saturn V's third-stage shroud.

One of the first Lego sets I coveted and never got in my childhood was a "moon explorer" kit that was effectively the very first version of this one. But it was in the early 1970s before any of the specialized parts in this model existed, so the representation was somewhat loose; there weren't even minifigs (I'm not even sure those big Lego people with multi-jointed arms existed yet), so the astronauts were rigid statues assembled out of bricks.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and the detail that for some reason impresses me the most: They bothered to make the fuel and oxidizer tanks on the sides of the ascent stage different sizes, so that, seen from the front, the thing has the same strange lopsided appearance as the genuine article.

[jecook]

That's cool.

[urbeatle.livejournal.com]

you have the coolest friends and/or wives.

[(Anonymous)]

Legos are cool. I have a soccer lego set that has all the parts for a soccer field (including nets, flags, and even sponsorship stickers) and it has a set of female players (with lipstick and long hair) and a set of male players (some with beards and mustaches).

Claudia
www.thepoorman.net/claw/