Thursday, February 26, 2009

4-Wide Mobile Command Center

Name of Model: Micro Agents
Created by: nolnet
Found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nolnet/tags/microagents/
Details:
There's an interesting phenomenon in recent LEGO's more recent kits - cars are getting bigger. 4-studs wide became fairly standard in the mid 1960's, and didn't really go anywhere all through the 1990's. Of course, minifigs are themselves nearly 4 studs wide, and real cars generally seat two people in the front - so these cars, while fun, were almost always incredibly out of scale. Minifig scale has always been considered a meaningless term by many serious LEGO fanatics, since the car scale has little to do with minifig size, train size, building size, etc - there are just too many different scales that the company has sold as made for minifigs over the years.

This gets a bit painful for some of us long-time LEGO fans - we have 4-wide cars lining our roadplates, and now we're getting cars that are more accurately scaled (or even overscaled, which is the case for the set this model is based on), and suddenly it's clear that many of the cars we've been buying for years are the wrong scale. Naturally, we're finding clever ways to change the scales and sizes of things to make things more consistent. Which size to switch to is a topic of much debate, but the creator of today's model decided to take the awesome Agents Mission 6: Mobile Command Center kit (a 12-stud wide beast that contains a number of smaller vehicles and all sorts of goodies) and turn it into a 4-stud wide truck (with 6-wide trailer) closer in scale to the vehicles of my childhood.

I don't know if I should call this microscale (it is a less than half-size version of a real set) or minifig scale (it matches the "minifig-scale" vehicles of my childhood), but it is darn awesome.

Well, now that I look through more of the photos and see the interior of the trailer (awesome!) and the smaller versions of two other Agents setsicon, I'm thinking I'll call this microscale. Or, again, maybe just "awesome". I think we're at a new "awesome"'s per post record...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, thanks for the blogging. I check in here once or twice a week and this took me by surprise today. Feels great to have a fascinating LMOTD in my portfolio :-)

Great article about the problems with minifig scale as well. It pretty much depicts my thoughts about that matter when I built the micro agents.
Allow one minor nitpick though: The scale of the truck is not less than half size, but exactly half size. It's six wide at the wheelbase and mudguards, four wide at the cab and five wide in between.

cheers,
Moritz

Lego Model of the Day said...

I'm pretty sure I saw this plugged at The Brothers Brick as well. I'd be pretty surprised if Bruce over at MicroBricks doesn't blog it soon too.

That error should be corrected now. I guess my secret's out, though - as much as I love this set, I haven't actually built mine yet!