Can Europe be improved in 21332 The Globe?

I’m glad LEGO didn’t enlarge Europe/the Northern Hemisphere at the expense of Africa and other southern continents. It shows a commitment to realism and opposition to eurocentrism. That said, some of these alterations do look better, so well done!

They clearly should have made the entire globe smooth and given us stickers....

I applaud your efforts on Europe, even the original design was only ok but Lego just seem to have got it wrong. Its a shame as the concept is wonderful but the finished product is some what ugly. I really wanted to buy this set but whats the point if I don't even recognise my own country.

I'm sure all the people that loudly complained about it are just /dying/ to show us their suggestions.

Should just be a big sticker haha

the first one, with just 3 more pieces looks so much better... the scaling might be more of for some details of Europe now, but it feels more right and not like something is missing :>

I will be buying the globe, and I will be modding it my liking.

To me, that's the joy of Lego -- the building and the modding.

THe first change looks the best.

I'd also be tempted to move the quarter circle at tip of N Africa 1 stud West as the Straight of Gibraltar is too far East, I think. Then I could rotate both pieces used for the Iberian Peninsula 90deg counter-clockwise which would overcome the clipped Portugal and provide a better shape for southern Spain.

@empire0 said:
"They clearly should have made the entire globe smooth and given us stickers...."

I know this is a joke but I'm still angry about it >:|

Europe looks fine on the globe on my desk (about the size of a baseball and the base is a pencil sharpener). That is because it's printed. With LEGO, intricate things like globes/maps can be difficult as you have to work with existing parts.

Unless LEGO does a globe in Modulex, I don't see how it can be improved without changing the scale completely.

I'm interested in a challenge.

Recreating the Mario Odyssey world map with this set.

I think the Lego Globe is superb bearing in mind it's a representation of a globe, and not of individual continents. Changing the odd stud here and there is obviously very easily possible, but barely noticeable from normal viewing distances, so is neither here nor there!

So often there are complaints that a real one is more accurate and cheaper (Typewriter, NES, Trainer, etc) but that really is missing the point of Lego!

Typical of a UK site to go and try to improve Europe :D

It was funny to read Brittany as a part of France. You see: Brittany but not in Britain.
It turned out, you call Bretagne this way.:)

@NatureBricks: If "literally anything" is better, then just leave Europe off.

I think they did an overall good job with the scale they had, and given the user base of the site, it's unsurprising so many are fixated on the errors in Europe. But every complicated coastline, especially on a joint between segments, is equally jacked. Southeast Asia/Indonesia, the Red Sea/Persian gulf, the Caribbean, the Maritimes provinces of Canada, all look pretty far from their actual form.

I didn't know that people hated that part of the build since I didn't read the comments sections of the articles about this set but I came up with a joke about people on here just removing everything but the Europe part. It turns out that the reverse is the case.

As for me, I'd take out anything other than America as a proud cheeseburger pickup truck gun citizen. Maybe I'd leave in Japan as well, being the weeb that I am. Or I'd only remove Italy, it's not like I wouldn't be alive without them or anything.

If you don’t like it then just rotate it around to North/South America. ;) hehe

Sorry, but if you showed me any of those without context, I wouldn’t recognise any of them as being a representation of Europe. The set is a fail for me for this reason alone.

They should have selected another set from the batch if they couldn’t accurately represent Europe. How it got through all stages of product review to release is a mystery to me.

with how people are acting, the rest of the continents could have been wiped off the face of the globe and no one would notice! (or care)

I think it's already generous as it is, since Europe is really just a subcontinent of Asia

*ducks to avoid tomatoes*

Scandinavia remains a mess. Replace the 1x1 tile at the base of Norway with a quarter circle oriented like the base of Sweden and rotate the quarter-circle representing Denmark to an upper-left quandrant instead of an upper-right one, and things might be better. Also, a solution to the problem of the Iberian peninsula might be a 1x2 representing the eastern side of the peninsula with another quarter-circle (oriented as a lower-right quadrant) to represent southeast Spain; this would open up the straits of Gibraltar a little better. Also, I'd flip Scotland into an upper-left quadrant, and the "foot" of Italy into a lower-right (or perhaps upper-left?) one. I prefer your first solution to the Mediterranean Sea; the second one really distorts the shape of Italy too much for my taste. You clearly show that only minor fiddling can really improve the shape of Europe without compromising the other land masses, though, and that's wonderful. Thank you!

Fiddling with the tiny details is most of the fun (for me at least) with any Lego set; why should doing that with this model be any different? I'm sorry people seem more inclined to complain (or counter-complain) than to try their own hands at continent-building.

You Europeans are funny. I don't hear anyone in the US complaining that Cape Cod is missing from Massachusetts, there are no great lakes, or about the lack of San Francisco Bay or Puget Sound. (We're used to Florida having issues though, so that's to be expected) Where are the Canadians complaining about the Pacific islands or maritime provinces? Poor Bermuda isn't even on the globe at all!

It's Lego, for pete's sake! The resolution is only so precise. Get over it or you'll never be happy.

What's up with all the European bashing? I think the main point is that many countries can't be recognized that should be large enough to be distinguished (I'm not complaining that my homeland NL is invisible). I don't think any American or Canadian had trouble finding their country even if it's not perfectly accurate.

Another option could have been 3 printed tiles: one 2x2 representing the UK and Ireland, the second also a 2x2 representing the Italian and Balkan peninsulas and the third tile would be 1x2 and would show Denmark and southern Sweden. All tiles would be dark blue with the land masses in green. Of course doing something like this would give a good representation of these countries but then people from other places around the world would cry of favouritism; then you would need a whole bunch more for the Caribbean and most of the pacific isles. In the end, one has to accept that this is Lego, it is meant to show what is actually possible to build out of Lego and not to present an accurate representation of the earth. Or ever simpler, just tell people that this is a globe dating back to 1500ish - this is roughly how much was known of the planet at that time (not true but just stick to it!).

@GIJM said:
"I think it's already generous as it is, since Europe is really just a subcontinent of Asia

*ducks to avoid tomatoes*"

I'll just take the globe, build Europe four times the current size and use a 1x1 round tile for each of the other continents :-p

My question is can you “flip” the globe over so that the Australian continent is on top where it should be?

Can Europe be improved in the 21332 The Globe? It is asking a lot of a Lego set isn’t it? Surely this is a job for the EU.

@Alatariel said:
"What's up with all the European bashing? I think the main point is that many countries can't be recognized that should be large enough to be distinguished (I'm not complaining that my homeland NL is invisible). I don't think any American or Canadian had trouble finding their country even if it's not perfectly accurate. "

To be fair, the United States and Canada are substantially larger in size than essentially every European country

@Alatariel said:
"What's up with all the European bashing? I think the main point is that many countries can't be recognized that should be large enough to be distinguished (I'm not complaining that my homeland NL is invisible). I don't think any American or Canadian had trouble finding their country even if it's not perfectly accurate. "

America and Canada are bigger than most European countries. I didn’t mean to Europe-bash if that’s what it seemed like I was doing, I was just trying to make a bunch of goofy edgy jokes.

@lippidp said:
"Should just be a big sticker haha"

I think the NA version would be two stickers: "USA" and "Not USA".... ;-)
(sorry - couldn't resist!)

All they needed was 7 more parts.
(BUEP = Big Ugly Europe Piece)

Personally I think the only thing missing from this set is a motor!

Personally, I don't really think the "improvements" suggested here are that effective. The amount of detail that gets added feels excessive compared to the rest of the continents, and turns a low-detail but clean-looking representation of Europe into a muddled mess. Recognizable features like bodies of water end up feeling chopped up and segmented by the landmasses when you reduce the things like the clearance between Italy and Africa to the point where it's even narrower than the "gaps" in the faces of the globe itself.

The only reason the Iberian Peninsula used a tile is that the shape they wanted was only available as a tile. I don’t see why you used a 2x2 corner tile around a 1x1 plate when you could have just used a 2x2 plate. The only instances I can see where they used a tile or tile-like surface where a matching plate was available is 1x1 round. But a 1x1 round tile looks wider than a 1x1 round plate because the wide part is bulkier, and you’re not distracted by the narrower stud.

Personally, I’m in favor the idea of rotating the existing Iberian Peninsula 90° so the missing corner is in the SE instead of the SW, and probably rotating the tile representing Point Cires 90° clockwise as well.

@TheOtherMike:
Even in Newton’s Cannon, only England (or at least the part where London was located) gets wiped from the face of the Earth.

@joshhaslego:
Did they fill in the Western Hemisphere? I haven’t seen much proof that it exists.

@PDelahanty:
I mentioned the lack of Great Lakes. I noted that, along with Florida, Alaska, and Hawaii, it’s one of four US states that can be recognized solely by the shape of its coastline. Of those four, it’s the only one that‘s missing.

@Alatariel:
Most of the complaints about the final set have focused solely on the depiction of Western Europe, and many of the people who posted them suggested they were skipping the set because of it. A lot of island nations are too small to even show up, and landlocked nations like Mongolia, Zambia, and Paraguay aren’t identifiable due to the lack of political borders. Yes, the US and Canada are easy to spot, but we’re two of the four largest nations by area, and the only two of those that span an entire continent.

I think the worst part was how many people suggested the original submission was better, even though Europe ate an entire strip off Northern Africa and became grossly inflated in size as a result (something that globes are supposed to avoid).

I think there needs to be a point where people go, “Ok, this is a Lego representation of a real item. It’s not going to be 100% accurate.”

The Typewriter doesn’t type on a page. The Adidas’ can’t be worn. And that’s fine.

It's still upside down.

@Ridgeheart:
This may come as a surprise to you, but many of the Europeans who bash Americans for not having an in-depth understanding of European geography think the US is as small as their own nation, just because they look the same size on one-page paper maps. Someone I knew in college had family from Germany visit him in Michigan, and they thought the Grand Canyon would make a nice day trip. Just the official US spans six time zones, without counting territories, protectorates, and the like. We have individual national parks bigger than many European nations. Heck, we probably have some roads that are wider than a couple European nations.

The inability to represent a realistic map on a globe , is conclusive proof that the Earth is flat ??

@Alatariel said:
"What's up with all the European bashing? I think the main point is that many countries can't be recognized that should be large enough to be distinguished (I'm not complaining that my homeland NL is invisible). I don't think any American or Canadian had trouble finding their country even if it's not perfectly accurate. "

It's because eastern Canada is bigger than the entirety of Europe. Yet if you divide by province (which are somewhat closer in scale to some of the bigger European countries), you still can't recognize them well. Quebec for example, with the Maritimes, have very peculiar shapes, all absent from the globe.

So while I don't think there's a need for european bashing, for sure the european outrage is hilarious. It's a great set, at a very nice scale, but it just doesn't show fine details. Buuuut, it's Lego and customizable, who would have thought?

Great article CapnRex, I'll take a look at your ideas once I get the set!

I'd like to see a different version of the globe with glow-in-the-dark pieces used for heavily-populated areas. Then, on that or a different model, a mix of earth blue and bright blue for deep and shallow water, earth green and dark green for tropical and temperate forests on land, sand yellow and brick yellow for deserts, and white for glacial areas.

I know that's asking for a lot of detail... but even just turning out the lights and seeing the night-time view with the glowing bricks would be awesome.

@gunther_schnitzel said:
"I don’t care about being able to distinguish individual European countries. That isn’t the issue. Europe as a continent is unrecognisable. That is the issue.

And if they couldn’t manage that then the set shouldn’t have proceeded."

And yet you could still locate it just fine on the lego globe if asked to.