Advent 2011 Day 18

Day 18 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

Today, we have in City a crook with a crowbar, preparing to break into and steal the police car, no doubt.

Star Wars brings us another sweet micro ship – this time the Y-wing…. or maybe it’s another minifig scale UCS model?

Advent 2011 Day 17

Day 17 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

Today we get the rest of the police car in the City calendar. It’s just a pile of loose parts pretty much, like yesterday, until it’s placed on the car-in-progress. I don’t really like this approach, as it feels like LEGO is trying to cheat us out of having as many builds as we would if each one were standalone. And it’s not even that good of a car. I’d rather pay $5 more for the calendar and have complete builds in each day.

On the Star Wars side, we get a display rack for Star Wars weapons. I am guessing this must be for the Star Wars fans to keep their collectible models from the movies. The wiki page (SPOILER ALERT) just says “Weapons Rack” so that doesn’t really tell us anything.

Advent 2011 Day 16

Day 16 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

Unsurprisingly, we get some more parts for yesterday’s car chassis today. I didn’t like the fact that unlike the police/jail building, you can’t make today’s parts into a single model… they can only exist as a model when applied to the chassis we got yesterday.

Star Wars gives us a Clone Pilot today, shown below driving the car consisting of yesterday’s chassis plus the new parts from today.

My MOC featured in Australian housing article

My Yellow Victorian House MOC (“My Own Creation”) has been featured in an article about the housing boom/bubble in Australia. Since I use the Creative Commons licensing for my photos, that’s just fine with me, and they gave my name (“Bill Ward’s brickpile”) so people can easily Google me and find the rest of my work. That’s what Creative Commons is for!

Thanks to Tim “gambort” Gould for pointing this out to me.

Advent 2011 Day 15

Day 15 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

In City, we have the chassis of a car, which from looking at the box I am guessing that tomorrow will bring the top of it, making a police car.

In Star Wars, we have a microscale Republic Attack Gunship (an atmospheric ship seen in the prequel movies and Clone Wars).

Thanks to Steven Combs of Bricks in my Pocket, who is also doing an Advent calendar series, though only focusing on Star Wars, I can now sound like I know what I’m talking about. He posted a link to the Brickipedia article about the Star Wars Advent calendar, listing what all the things are. (SPOILER ALERT – if you go to that page you can find out about all 24 days! For me, half the fun is not knowing what each day will bring, so be warned!) According to that article, here are the models we’ve seen so far:

  • Day 1: Republic Cruiser
  • Day 2: Nute Gunray
  • Day 3: Nute Gunray’s walking mechano chair
  • Day 4: Homing Spider Droid
  • Day 5: Boba Fett’s Slave I
  • Day 6: Chewbacca
  • Day 7: Tools Rack
  • Day 8: Rebel Pilot
  • Day 9: X-wing
  • Day 10: Imperial Shuttle
  • Day 11: Pilot battle droid with gun
  • Day 12: Snowspeeder
  • Day 13: R2-Q5
  • Day 14: Mouse Droid
  • Day 15: Republic attack gunship

Advent 2011 Day 14

Day 14 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

Today City brings us a crime-fighting desk, with a cute yet simple lamp using a minifig telescope as the pole, and a magnifying glass over a blank grey tile – presumably one being examined for fingerprints.

In Star Wars we have a simple yet effective design for a small droid, or very small scale car perhaps. I think it’s one of the little droids from the original movie that the Jawas were selling?

For a context shot I’ve brought together the police station, the recent police officer, and the new desk; and the recent three droids.

Advent 2011 Day 13

Day 13 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

No jail or police station is complete without a cop. He comes with two walkie-talkies, which have been around since 1978, and two baseball caps, which are a new style this year. If he wears a baseball cap on a Tuesday, what do they wear on Casual Friday?

Star Wars provides the anti-R2D2. I’m sure it’s something from Clone Wars or maybe one of the prequel movies, but I don’t recognize it. It’s nice to get those legs in black though.

No group photo today.

Advent 2011 Day 12

Day 12 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

For the second day in a row, City provides us with a piece of the police/jail building. It looks like this completes the building.

Star Wars is back to the cool micro ships, this time with a clever little snowspeeder from Empire Strikes Back.

Star Wars doesn’t seem to be following the multi-day themes, so we’ll just show the updated police building:

Advent 2011 Day 11

Day 11 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

Today City brings us the third piece of the police/jail building. I don’t remember ever seeing an Advent calendar from LEGO where a building is made out of several days’ entries.

Over in Star Wars, the cool micro scale ship trend appears to have dried up, and we have a basic battle droid, which doesn’t thrill me. But I do like the extra arms – it comes with two of each type of arm, and bonus arms are always useful.

The battle droid doesn’t really fit with previous days so this time I’ll just show you a picture of the three parts (so far) of the police building put together:

Advent 2011 Day 10

Day 10 of the LEGO City and Star Wars Advent Calendars for 2011.

City fails to impress today, giving us a little campfire, and a fish-o-one-tail (as opposed to cat-o-nine-tails). Again with the oddly inappropriate weapons. Merry Christmas.

However on the Star Wars front, we have a mini ship that I would say was awesome, but I’m jaded after yesterday’s super-cool X-wing fighter: the Imperial Shuttle. More mini models of LEGO models built by minifigs.

Wouldn’t a micro scale house or garbage truck be more awesome than a dumb campfire? Who’s with me? C’mon LEGO, you can do better.

Accumulated items from days 6-10:

And as a reminder, here’s days 1-5: