Caterpillar time! The big boy needs wheels (or similar). Build time for these was about an 45 minutes for both.
And here are the caterpillars attached to the base chassis.
Lego 46 Model 42055 Part 4
Lego 46 Model 42055 Part 3
This Lego model is being constructed in sections. These communications are in line with the numbered bags of legos in the kit. The first part of the kit was to make the dumper truck covered here, this took about an hour.
Here is my workspace:
I use pasta bowls to hold the pieces while I work. This saves them from dropping into the fireplace or bouncing under furniture on the floor.
This was the first main part of this part of the build:
More of the framework:
And this is the final part of this build. This section is the base unit with driver gears for the caterpillar tracks.
This took about an hour. So far, total time is two hours.
Lego 48 Model 75169
Another in this mni-Lego season. Here we have Qui-Gon fighting Darth Maul in the Naboo power station (?). Obi-Wan awaits to avenge what is about to happen!
You are being spoilt these days as we have another gallery for you!
Kong: Skull Island
I took a birthday trip to see Kong: Skull Island at the Rochester Cineworld Cinema. If you don’t know me by now, then you’ll never, ever know that I rate my movies on the IMDB website, but there’s a catch. I explained my rating system here, but I think scores have been creeping recently so I may have to redefine the system. Watch this space. When I decide my score I tweet it, which leads to a quite nice embedded format:
I rated Kong: Skull Island (2017) 4/10 #IMDb https://t.co/Yx7DMF4s8n
— Ian Parish (@iparish) March 18, 2017
I had originally scored this as a 6, but upon reflection it didn’t deserve to be rated that highly, hence my change of mind.
Because, this film, was, shit.
SPOILERS ahead.
The script was appalling, lazy, stereotypical bullshit. Samuel L Jackson’s eyes got too much screen time. The film makers can’t count helicopters.
The monsters looked brilliant. I’m not really aware of the mythology around the Kong character but in this film he seemed to be more of an accidental benevolent monster type thing rather like Godzilla than all out terrible monster. I guess it’s OK because he fell in love with Brie Larson, who didn’t get smashed to death inside Kong’s hand while he ripped the brain out of a two legged lizard thing. It was irritating that Brie Larson seemed to spend all her time with a bag strap over her chest to enhance her breasts, this wasn’t needed, it seemed sexist to me.
The characters were terrible. War mad generals, smooth calm SAS member, crazy scientist with stupid theories, tribe who don’t speak. It was lazy terrible bullshit.
I can suspend my disbelief for gigantic monsters on an island surrounded by a perpetual storm. That bit was fine. The rest of this was bollocks.
It’s the little things. Little things that shouldn’t be things I have to write about. Like helicopters that materialise from nowhere. On the ship travelling to Skull Island there were, quite clearly, one Chinook, one Sea Stallion and four Hueys. All of a sudden when they take off to head to Skull Island the Hueys had babies and there were eight of them!! I have no idea where they came from. I also don’t know where the helos at the end of the film came from unless the US Navy had a task force nearby.
Oh, the Hueys had tape players and speakers. I can’t quite decide if this was an homage to Apocalypse Now! or just a plain bullshit rip off. The shots were almost exactly the same.
If you want a film with rebellious music, at least make the music decent. There was a ton of decent stuff around in the 1973 setting.
The two chaps who had crashed on Skull Island in the opening sequence made a boat out of aircraft parts. The team spent about a day turning this hulk of 29 year old metal into a working boat by turning some bolts and waggling some leavers. They made a metal thing work smoothly after 29 years in a humid environment. They must be geniuses. Oh and then, when they get the engine running it pops away smoothly and quietly in the background. Let me tell you that there are NO aero engines that run “quietly” in the background. That engine would have been producing in excess of 900bhp and no silencing. The makeshift boat would have torn itself apart.
According to the Wikipedia page I missed the post-credits scene where other monsters are revealed to the viewer. I don’t care.
If I wanted to be very extremely generous I could claim that the film was a complete metaphor for the USA’s battle against terrorism with Kong representing the terrorists. But I don’t want to be generous with this film.
Lego 46 Model 42055 Part 2
Part two of the journey into the largest Technic Lego kit ever available. I made the dumper trump that comes with the bucket excavator. It’s a nice little kit with steering and a raising bed.
The bed raised:
And finally, a mean front view.
What A Dump
This is the output from my radar server. If you want a better view then you can ask me for the details.
Hmm, there are page formatting issues. Not sure I care enough to fix them.
Lego 46 Model 42055 Part 1
This is part one of a series of communications about Lego Model 42055. It’s a monster and so will be spread in sections as I am looking forward to categorising my journey.
This is the box:
There’s a Lego DeLorean on top to give an idea of scale. It is a very big box. It is the largest Technics set. The box has a gatefold style to it and so opens out to look like this:
The next exciting part was opening the box and spreading out the various part-bags. There are nearly four thousand pieces in this monstrosity and here some of them are:
The white box on the right has the instruction book and also more part-bags in it!
And finally for your delectation I have an image of the instruction book.
Thus ends the first communication concerning 42055.
Blocked
With reference to the previous communication I can update the main blockages on the ADS-B splat. I wrote about this before here.
The blocked area labelled 1 covers the North Downs. This natural boundary lurks to the NE of me and I can’t do a great deal about it.
The blockage labelled 2 is, I believe, down to the aerial being inside my loft and the terrace houses of my block extending in that direction. I wrote about that here. The only way to improve this range would be to get the aerial placed above the roof of my house, which is not a job I am going to undertake. I may, however, consider getting someone else to do it.
Pre-Amp Filter
These communications contain many items concerning the virtual radar system that lives in my loft and you can see a selection here. A short while ago I decided to buy an pre-amp and filter for my system to improve the range and number of aircraft being received. So, this communication now requires a large number of pictures to give you an idea of what this means.
In the above picture you can see that there are around 20 aircraft and the black area [the range of the receiver] doesn’t quite reach Norwich, Portsmouth, Bristol or Calais. There is the NW-SE block as described before.
This coloured splat gives pretty much the same information but uses colours for the ranges of aircraft at different altitudes.
I bought a filter which only allows signals close to the 1090MHz requirement through to the USB stick I bought. It also acts as a pre-amp so there is an overall 14 dB gain.
Here is the whole Virtual Radar system living in the loft:
Once this kit was turned on I looked at the DUMP1090 output from the Raspberry Pi and pretty much shat myself at the number of aricraft shown:
When this view is compared to the twenty or so aircraft that I had before you can see an immense improvement in the receivers ability.
Virtual Radar Server is a program I use on the RPi for a more detailed view, there are quite a few customisations you can create also. It is the software that will create the splat over time, keeping track of the aircraft and their position.
The distances have increased as has the overall coverage. I now track around 100 aircraft at a time. For a small sum of money the overall increase in detail has been terrific. I can now reach over northern France, over Wales and a lot of the channel to the SW.
A side by side comparison.
Lego 45 Model 70364
Here’s a Lego Nexo Knight. I think there are things you can do with the shields in a game. That is the sum extent of my knowledge.
