Planet Earth and Moon in Orbit

The build itself asks a bit more of you than the low piece count suggests. Several steps have you seating multiple connector pins into sub-assemblies at once, and getting them properly home sometimes means squinting back at the instructions to check the geometry. It is not a punishing build, but it is not a mindless one either, and the payoff is that you slowly watch a gear train assemble into something that actually keeps time. There is a 36-tooth gear near the base doing a lot of the heavy lifting, gearing the motion down so the input crank turns into those slow, accurate orbits up top.

The headline parts are the brand new molds. The Sun and the Earth are both built from exclusive half-sphere pieces that had not appeared before this set, and the two Earth halves come printed with the continents rather than stickered. The Moon is a neat bit of parts economy, just a light bluish grey ball joint that reads perfectly as our little satellite. A common gripe worth knowing: the Earth print does not line the equator up with the seam between the two halves, which nags at some builders, and the visible pin holes in the spheres divide opinion too. For me they just underline that this is proudly a Technic model.