I would love to be a Lego Master Builder. Working at Lego, designing new models, surrounded by all the Lego I could ever want...
And I know it would not all be glamorous, no job is. But even knowing that and limitations that folks like Ulrik Pilegaard and Mike Mike Dooley talk about in their book "
Forbidden Lego", I think it would be awesome for at least a little while to roam the halls of Lego.
Barring that heady experience, I would love to have a few beers with one. Especially the ones that designed the UCS Millennium Falcon, if at the very least to ask a few questions about the design.
Every large set has a few instructions where you kinda pause and scratch your head trying to figure out what designer was trying to accomplish. Usually, fast forwarding a few steps, the puzzling instructions become clear. Every once in while though, you run across things like this:
 |
| All for one! |
This is the rear of the Millennium Falcon, you can see the transparent blue 1x2 tiles used for the engine exhaust and light gray "Boat Rigging" that wraps around the rear of the ship to make the blue tiles look like they have their own little compartments. Those boat rigging piece connect via 1x1 dark gray tiles with a clip on top (center) and they, in turn, connect to a stack of three 2x3 light gray plates.
Why go with three 2x3 light gray plates when a single 2x3 brick should do the same job? Plates are not three times cheaper (and I doubt they were in 2007 when this set debuted). I cannot see how having a stack of plates would be more structurally sound than a single brick. My best guess is they experimented with a stack of two plates but then decided to bump to three near the end of the process.
Another example from the UCS Millennium Falcon can be found a bit later while building out the assemblies of the outer hull:
On the left is the underside of one of the hull assemblies. Notice that near the middle you can see a single dark red brick.
When you attach this assembly, only the top side is visible and what you see is on the right.
That red brick is now on the inside of the Falcon, in a place where you will never see it.
The compliment assembly on the other side does not have the red brick.
The Millennium Falcon has several asymmetrical features where one side will have a different color part, or different feature; just like the movie Falcon it is decorated to look patched and modified. So it is not crazy that one side has a random dark red plate that the other does not have. The strange thing is that you will never see it in the completed build!
Again, I think this was probably an oversight. At some point in the build process that part was visible and over the series of design iterations it was covered but never removed or replaced.
Aberrations like these do not detract from a great set, at most they may cause the builder a few minutes of time as they scratch their head head and think "That's strange" to themselves. In the case of one of the largest and most complex sets offered, you would expect to find a few of these puzzles somewhere in the 300+ pages of instructions.
And for UCS Millennium Falcon, a ship that is famous for all the quirks resulting from years of tinkering by Han, Chewie, Lando and others, it seems appropriate to have a few oddities built in.
