Dan's Excellent LEGO Collection

This is a page devoted to my Lego collection. Though there is much here that is frivolous, or at least very silly, I hope that this page has been of some use to humanity at large.

And if not, well, at least it hasn't hurt anyone, save grievously offending the sensibilities of the hysterical author of this turgid screed.

BULLETIN: Black Seas Barracuda soon to enter refit

At some point in the last three house-moves I made, I disassembled the Black Seas Barracuda for stowage. Recently I discovered that I also had made the incredibly bonehead move of LOSING THE INSTRUCTIONS.

So I posted a plea for help to USENET's rec.toys.lego newsgroup, and a helpful correspondent at Lucent sent me b/w xeroxes of her Black Seas Barracuda instructions.

BULLETIN: Another Addition to the Black Seas Barracuda

A couple MIRVs, made from rocket nosecone sections on the front of cylinders, with a base-bleed heatshield on the back and a colored 1x1x1 flat round on the front, and my pirate ship now has nuclear weapons capabilities. I haven't worked out a delivery mechanism yet; perhaps I will build a delivery truck.

Constructions: Coming Soon

Problems

I'm having trouble finding pieces nowadays. There is so much Lego lying around on top of my table that it's a royal pain to find any pieces when I want to.

Pirate Robot Song

I didn't write this, but I don't remember who did; it came from a posting to rec.toys.lego, reacting to someone's description of the set 6266 Cannon Cove; the description said, Well, it came with an island and a pirate rowboat; the author of this song pretended to misunderstand and said, `Oooh, a Pirate Robot? That's really cool! It would chase the Imperial Soldiers around and sing this song! ..oh. Pirate Row_boat_. Never mind.')

Anyway, if you wrote this song or know who did, please tell me so I can credit the author. I don't want people going around thinking I wrote this song, because I didn't.

(to the tune of "Yankee Doodle")

I'm a Pirate Robot from the future here to greet you
Chop you up in little pieces then proceed to eat you
Pirate Robot chop you up
Pirate Robot candy
Grind the bones up with a "snap"
And with the brains make brandy!

Update: Using Google News, I found the posting again. Message-ID: <CHJqHL.4L9@news.cis.umn.edu> on alt.toys.lego.

The Lego Ice Planeteers - are they peaceful cross-country skiing enthusiasts, or a bunch of chainsaw-wielding MANIACS?

It's suspicious. The Ice Planeteers showed up at just about the time that the M-Tron people died out mysteriously. Plus, what can one do on an Ice Planet? Mine ice? Hah! Why would one need to mine ice when you could suck up all the water you want from the ocean! (We know there's an ocean in Legoland, otherwise what did you think all these boats were for?) Obviously they're up to something sneaky.

A complaint

I've recently done some experimentation on my Big Pirate Ship. I'd been mucking around with a nice folding-wing jet airplane for a while when I realized that what my pirates really needed was a catapult-launched reconaissance aircraft. So now my pirate ship is the first in the 18th century to have a steam-powered catapult, complete with scout plane.

My biggest complaint with 18th-century naval architecture? It doesn't give you a good place to mount the Phalanx.

Now that I've added ol' R2D2, I realize you can't really cost-justify an anti-ASM CIWS without a substantial anti-ship missile threat, so I expect to be mounting some sort of missile launcher soon. Look for a Harpoon or Tomahawk box launcher to be added to the starboard midships area (the portside has the floatplane).

Did I mention the crow's-nest-level landing cradle for the personal anti-gravity patrol vehicle? It must have slipped my mind.

Thoughts on Riot Control Vehicles

What do you need to do to modify a standard street-legal lego vehicle into something suitable for riot control? (Or worse, for griot control?) Here are my thoughts on the matter:

We may assume that all windshields are already made of shatterproof armor-glass.
(Important.) Add some kind of screening over the windshield, to protect against Molotovs and thrown rocks. My favorite for this is a truck's front grille on a pivot so it folds back in an angled kind of way. (Why, you may be asking, do we need a grille when the windshield is already guaranteed bulletproof? Well, because it looks really cool. The standard reason why things are added to Lego constructions.)
Riot-control troops. A riot-control vehicle is useless without a squad of highly-trained riot-control troops who can employ a measured response, ranging from simple whacks on the head with a stick through electric shocks from a cattle prod on up to chainsaws, firearms, death-ray weapons, and beyond. (Seriously! I have Lego nukes now, and I even have a delivery system! It's a guy with a hand truck and a porter's cap, who politely shows up with your nuke and waits patiently for you to sign for it. (Oh, you thought I meant delivering them in combat? Perish the thought! Who would clean up all the mess from the carpet?))
Running boards. You need somewhere for the aforementioned riot-control dudes to stand.
Griot-control is easy. Ask them (politely) to stop telling folklore and they'll go away quite peacefully. If that doesn't work, put away the wine jug.
Water cannon. Oops! I haven't added these yet! Guess it's time to stop poking around in my Web page and get some building done!

My collection

I own the following lego sets:

715 BASIC medium vehicle set
6539 Victory Cup Racers
1845 Big Honkin' BASIC bucket
A three-unit value pack including:
- 1624 An archer with a target
- 1547 Three medieval soldiers on a dragon's-head longboat
- 1596 A Wolfpack guy sneaking up on a ghost that lives in a little plastic cave/mountain
1491 Dual Defender: A two-armed catapault with which Davin threw pieces all the way across his living room to behind the fishtank.
The 20th Anniversary Jackpot Bucket - 700 pieces celebrating the 20th anniversary. Anniversary of what we'll never know (since Lego has been around since the late 50s). Anyway, a lower price per piece than any other set I've ever seen.
The Midnight Transport set - a jet plane, a helicopter, and a van, all in black, with various shady characters loading and unloading suitcases of money. (Yes, that's right, they are OBVIOUSLY drug dealers.)
8034 Universal Building Set: A yellow Technic set which is mostly good for making steerable vehicles.
6285 Black Seas Barracuda: Last Year's model, big pirate ship!!!!! Came in a beat-up box and was missing a cannon.
Dumb Little box of Useless Duplos (x2)
1492 Battle Cove: Pirate Guy On Island With Cannon. This is how I made up the Pirate Ship's one-gun deficit.
6939 Spyrius Flying Saucer with drop-out moon vehicle w/robot. One of the most cool sets of all time.
6256 Islander Catamaran - King Kahuka and his daughter on their sail-propelled parrot-equipped catamaran.
6897 Rebel Hunter: A Space Police ship with drop-out jail cell, containing a penitent Blacktron miscreant. You'd be penitent too if the Space Police had you in a self-contained one-person prison that they could drop onto the rocky surface of an alien world from thousands of feet in the air.
6814 Ice Tunnelator: Ice Planet guy on balloon-tire vehicle. Contains the Famous Lego Chainsaw(tm)!!
1462 Galactic Scout: lone Blacktron guy on cheezy one-man space vehicle with folding wings.
6020 Magic Shop: A wizard (complete with glow-in-the-dark magic wand, long white beard, and pointy hat) and his palatial magic-user's home. Or at least his afternoon hangout. Ok, let's be honest. It's a hollow tree. Once they're done buying all those funny magic things, wizards don't have much money left over for rent.
6038 Wolfpack Renegades: Two wolfpack guys and their wagon, which contains (shh... HIDDEN TREASURE)!
6887 Allied Avenger: A vaguely X-Wing-ish Blacktron ship, with the typical Blacktron joker at the controls. This one has a faceted spherical cockpit at the front, made out of the usual yellow-green tinted Blacktron plastic.
6009 Black Knight: The Black Knight. What more can I say?
1549 (untitled): A blockish Santa Claus, complete with sack and chimney. What's in that sack for the good little children? Lego, no doubt.
6679 Dark Shark: Two dudes and their hellacious powerboat. (If their powerboat is so hellacious, how come it got marked down from $8.79 to $4.00 after it didn't sell for two years at K-Mart?)
6898 Ice-Sat V: An eight-wheeled Ice Planet vehicle (utilizing the Ice Planeteers' trademark Big Tire Technology (actually they stole it from the now-extinct M-Tron people), with a suspicious-looking surveillance sattelite mounted on a two-stage rocket booster. This was the one that I bought with the coupon from Steve Jackson.
6889 Recon Robot: A six-wheeled big tall Spyrius robot, with articulated arms and a suspicious-looking Spyrius dude who sits in the robot's back and controls it.
6878 Sub-Orbital Guardian: A vaguely helicopter-looking Blacktron ship with legs that appear to make it able to walk. Contains the now-standard Blacktron dude, who has a personal jetpack that he can fly around with.
1720 Cactus Canyon -- A three-part set that gives you a $3-off coupon. Contains:
- A dude in a stupid-looking kayak. That lasted about fifteen seconds after I built it.
- Another dude on a small dunebuggy-like vehicle. Not too interesting either.
- A reasonably nice land-rover, which I have been able to modify into the riot control vehicle.
6258 Smuggler's Shanty: Another small pirate set - a couple new pirates that I hadn't had before, plus another rowboat and an English Redcoat Guy. And a small camouflaged hangout place, which I installed on the rowboat to modify it for riverine warfare.
6075 Wolfpack Tower. This moat-situated castle set has a bunch of specialized castle-building pieces and another ghost.
6346 Space Shuttle Launching Crew. They're not really the Space Shuttle launching crew, more of a dragging the shuttle around on a trailer crew. With police escort.
Another box of pirate minifigures. These started off looking just like the ones from the pirate ship, which was kind of a problem because I didn't want to have duplicate people running around. (Well, this rule is already violated because I have duplicate people in the space shuttle set and the Dark Shark dudes are also identical twins (they are now working as riot control police (see above)), (as are some of the medieval soldiers) but I figured that the good guys should have individuality, and maybe the bad guys are all clones or something. Anyway, I swapped the hats and bodies and legs around, and now I have:
- A female wearing pirate crew clothes and the pirate captain hat. She is the captain of the small ship I just built.
- A guy wearing the pirate captain coat, a black tricorner hat, and white pants. He is the second-in-command.
- A guy wearing a red scarf over his head, the white top, and who has a pegleg. He also has a right hook for a hand. Hmm, that didn't sound right but you know what I mean. This guy is either a colorful particularly clever pirate, or he is evil, because he looks kind of evil. (I do not like the word 'sinister', because I am left-handed, and actually so is he!)
- The other guys, your basic 18th century soldier types, got assigned to the crews of the sniper boat and the mortar boat. (See below.)
6342 Beach Rescue Chopper. Two red-suited dudes with helmets and their turbine-engined rescue helicopter. They are in the midst of rescuing some poor slob on a sailboard catamaran who's ventured too far out into the sea. (Or is that ``off the deep end'', where people keep saying I've gone? Anyway.)
6277 Imperial Trading Post: I was in a fit of I-don't-like-my-job and it was on major sale (like $20 off) at Service Merchandise (hint -- always buy your lego there, it's even cheaper than at K-Mart), so I grabbed it. It was the last one left, and it had "Opened for Inspection" on a sticker on the end of the box, meaning that they opened it and built it to put it in a store display, just as the Black Seas Barracuda was when I bought it... it seems so long ago, yet it was only January 1994 when I bought the pirate ship.
Various sets that I didn't write down, which was probably a bad thing because now this list isn't correct any more.
Christmas in Bayside: Two big Exploriens sets (names not verbatim):
- 6982 Big White Spaceship With Hinged Wings That Fold Down Like The Great Wings Of A Bird Of Prey Swooping Down Upon Its Helpless Quarry
- 6958 Lunar Base With Hinged Skydome Panels That Fold Out Like The Great Wings Of A Hinged Building Folding Out To Allow The Inhabitants To Get A Nice Tan.
Sets Janet and I bought at Target
- 2152 Robo Raptor, guy on a robotic dragon
- 6037 A witch in her little dragon-powered flying machine.
- 6496, A Time Cruisers thing that frankly looks kinda like a Mardi Gras float. Janet built a whole Mardi Gras parade with parts cannibalized from this, including the Weird Guy on a Motorcycle, The Chinese Wizard from "The Good Earth" Guy, and, my personal favorite, the Guy With The Vacuum Cleaner Head.
Another Pirate Ship: 6789
6899, a little stationary base that looks faintly like a LEM, but more like a round greenhouse in blue atop a white fold-down pedestal. Ok, it's a little hard to describe.
Sets Janet got me for Christmas this year (1998):
- 6975 The Big Flying Saucer, new out this year, with the detachable smaller saucer that lives on top.
Sets we got as wedding presents:
- 6555, a little flippered scuba guy with a yellow Zodiac boat and a spear gun.

Somewhere between the two Basic buckets, I bought a big gray baseplate. I think it's 48x48.

Designs

If I get around to it, and if I have enough disk space, expect to see some Lego designs posted here. And if I figure out how to do so. First up would be the anti-gravity flying anti-tank vehicle that I made out of helicopter parts. Looks like a helicopter without rotors or tail boom - I wonder why...

Recent constructions

A converted offshore oil platform and assortment of flying vehicles. The idea behind this one was that I'd made a pretty good small-scale imitation of the flying police car from Blade Runner, and wanted to continue the theme. After making another car or two, I decided what I really needed was some kind of base for these cars to fly out to. So I built a structure that looked like it had once been an oil-drilling platform, but had been converted over to use as a mid-ocean patrol base for the Sky Police. Surrounded by the utter desolation that is the sea, it is a momentary blip on the radar of passing skycars, an oasis of light and safety amid the storm.

I think that if we ever get flying cars like the ones in Blade Runner, you'll be able to go all the way to Australia by yourself in your own car. You'll fuel up in Los Angeles, set the autopilot, and rock your seat back and go to sleep. You might not have the fuel capacity to go all the way to Australia in one go; you might stop over in a motel in Hawaii, or you might check your maps and set course for a refueling zone. Sky-tankers will orbit in endless racetracks, waiting for travellers to pull up and offload fuel. It'll be more expensive to buy gas up there in the sky than it is to buy it on the ground, but when you factor in the gas you'll burn dropping down to land and climbing back to cruising altitude, it's more reasonable.

A really cool-looking urban assault vehicle for riot control. This is something that I've been lacking for a while -- I have a strange gap in my Lego armada between immense machines of war on the one hand (like the Big Pirate Ship and the various spacecraft) and the little dudes running around with swords and spears on the other hand. Now I have land vehicles that can be used for a measured response to a minifigure riot, should one develop (heh heh heh).

A riverine-warfare PBR patrol boat. Like the boat in "Apocalypse Now". Two one-man gun turrets with what look like 25mm Bushmaster cannon, a radar, a windshield, all on a powerboat chassis. Not a bad tub for going out and shooting up the local river traffic in.

A riverine sniper's nest. This is a small boat with a platform on top; the platform is camouflaged with palm fronds and other foliage. This vehicle is nearly invisible from the air, blending in as it does with the rest of the jungle. From the top platform, one of the Revolutionary War guys will play sniper.

A mortar boat. A rowboat with a four-barreled rocket mortar (similar to the WWII German 'Nebelwerfer', I think) aboard. The mortar can be fired at sea (though not while under way) (well, you can but there's no stabilization so the accuracy sucks), and can also be dismounted for use in the ground role.

A small sailing ship. A small ocean-going craft, with a sail. Four crew members: the female pirate captain mentioned earlier, the second-in-command guy, the possibly-evil pirate, and a sniper guy -- wears a blue scarf as though he were a pirate-ship crewmember (on the big ship, only blue-scarved people are allowed up in the rigging, and they're not allowed to touch the cannons) (vice versa for red scarves), but this guy is wearing a marines coat and grey pants. He's pretty irregular-looking, but that's ok -- these are PIRATES! They like looking that way.

A flying assault vehicle. Built along the same basic lines as the helicopter from set 6342 (though I built it before I bought that set), this is open on both sides and has some rocket pods on the rear stub wings. It's useful for deploying a squad of Blacktron space marines to any trouble spot (a hell of a lot more useful than the paragliders I was trying to build; the marines didn't want to ride them) and it's flown (for whatever reason) by the Space Police guy. I guess he wanted another job.