![]() ![]() I've made some gifs to showcase this better: Inside the holes you can fit a Fiber Optic Cable, which lights up when the LED passes the hole. The LED can be rotated, so it appears in front of 8 holes on at the time. The Fiber Optic System (FOS) consists of a special brick with an LED build inside. Also, the system only appeared in a few sets in the span of 2 years. I can't find any proof of this, but knowing what the next years would bring (AKA the Dark Ages) makes me believe there can be some truth in it. According to multiple blogs, this element was so expensive to produce, LEGO lost money with every set the part came in. One of the most noteworthy of the new parts is the Fiber Optics Element. New Stuff! (For me)īesides being the largest set I've ever built at the time, there were a couple of other things in this set that were a first for me. ![]() Please join me on this trip back in time, as I'm rebuilding my childhood favorite. It's complexity and amount of functions was never seen before in a customer set, and even for today's standards it is still an impressive piece of machinery. It is the 2nd set to feature gear shifters and one of the first with the FOS system. It was one of the first sets to introduce Thick Liftarms, slowly starting the age of studless designs. With 1366 parts, it passes the 8880-1 Technic Super Car by 20 parts, making it the biggest Technic set at the time. Objectively, this is still an amazing set. I rather sleep in an alley with this set next to me, than having a house without my space shuttle. If I ever really get into financial problems, and need to sell everything to keep a roof over my head, this one stays. I don't remember the exact time, but I must have built for at least 2 days. But it was mine! That night, I put the set on my nightstand, so I would be sure the next morning it wasn't a dream. The payment took a while, counting a load of coins. It took more than a year, saving up birthday-money, earnings from my paper-route and buying no other LEGO, but eventually the glorious day came! I still remember going to the toy store, Speelgoedwinkel De Speelboom in Goor, the Netherlands, walking in, picking up the set and placing it on the counter. I don't know the exact price anymore, Brickset says $158,-, in my head it was somewhere high in the 200 Dutch guldens, so max €150,- now. My autism with accompanying obsessions probably played a role. I don't exactly know how or why it happened, but I decided that this set needed to be in my possession. Money was tight growing up, and this was looking to be another one of those 'never-gonna-happen'-things, of which the list was getting pretty long. This was the perfect combo! Such a massive, beautiful set, with so many functions and new things to drool over in the toy store. I was still heavily interested in everything that took place outside of the atmosphere, and I was at peak Technic interest. The 8480-1 Space Shuttle came at the perfect time for me as a 13 year old kid. Especially great personal memories, what might play a role in naming this the best set ever. ![]() This is the single greatest set LEGO has ever released! What can I say. He used one of the detailed models of Fermi as a basis for the design.NOTE: This review was written before the release of the 10283-1 NASA Discovery Space Shuttle. If you build one yourself ( and you certainly can) you'll discover many more. The details are exquisite: there's a tiny GBM (both the NaI and BGO detectors), high gain and low gain antennas, star trackers (yea, they're on the wrong side - artistic license), thermal radiators, various electronics boxes, and a cut-out in the LAT showing a pair-production event. It's hard to find a scientist or engineer that doesn't have fond memories of losing themselves in a pile of LEGO (and some of those memories are from the very recent past).Ī few years ago, one of the graduate students working on Fermi ( he's now a post-doctoral researcher at MPI) lost himself in a pile of LEGO and recreated the entire Fermi satellite. This is somewhat similar to dumping out a giant bin of LEGO, thinking up a crazy design, and then using those multi-colored bricks to construct something that didn't exist before. One of the incredibly rewarding parts of developing a mission is seeing your ideas and designs move from paper to a real-world device. This process included hundreds of engineers, scientists, managers, and other folks. But it took many years of planning, thinking, developing, and building before it got to that point. By now we all know that Fermi was launched 10 years ago. ![]()
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