@AllenSmith said:
"Technically, not all of these Technical Elements employ the Technic technique."

You win the internet for best comment of the day.

It would have been better with a technic fig.

The Spanish Inquisition of sets.

These parts offer endless possibilities if you are into classic Technic. I have some spare parts from the sets I can't complete anymore and could use some of those connectors with teeth today. I have the power kit 8700 and I used the parts and the motor in a very technic looking cable car from Ideas Book 8889, page 103.

I can’t wait for figurative elements to be RSotD.

Well, it's not the most exciting set. Technically.

It looks like it was assembled by a biology student.

Ha! I still have the box for this one!

I won this set in a building competion during the 25 years aniversary of LEGO in the Netherlands.

I could use such a supplementary set to alter builds without having to dissect other sets for parts. I don't know why Lego doesn't sell those anymore.

I have this & still have all the original parts & box. I think I bought it for parts for a vehicle I built for a schools science competition.

@MeisterDad said:
"Supplementary set is right: best I probably could do in-set here is build a motorcycle with pulleys as wheels, though upon further consideration I might be able to build some sort of a gearbox or windmill."

I once got this set while being in a hotel or something, and built a car. The only annoying thing was the gears getting stuck into the carpet.

IIRC this set got released several times under different numbers in different years.

Always felt sorry for the poor person who had to align all the parts by hand for the photo before the days of computer drawings. Easy to forget how limited it was to build gearing at right angles and vertically using system bricks and plates, before beams and frames came along. I like the way there are four differential gears but no differential to put them in, so just there to replace those lost or broken. Similarly, there are pulley wheels, but no elastic bands which did always got lost. Never had this as the motor sets seemed to make more sense to me.

This came in a small box, but it still had the flip lid, clear window and handy internal plastic tray more usually found with the bigger sets. There were also some useful building ideas on the back of the box, including a chair made from all those axles and connectors!

I always wonder if the professional photographer tasked with taking that picture (or that type of picture) always felt that they somehow hadn't reached their career potential...
But they do have a kind of beauty though - also how did they get the wires of the electrical supplementary sets perfectly laid out?

Yellow technic plates are some of my favorites. I only have two and plan to get more!

Technic beams with studs! Those were the days :-). You could *build* technic sets with parts like these, rather than simply assemble them. Lovely choice for RSotD. Would be fun to reimagine modern technic using 1970s and 1980s parts. And vice versa.

I have this set since I was 5. In combination with sets like 8020, it made many MOCs possible.

Currently have it disassembled though.

My budget-constrained young self got this, and it allowed me to build many technic things, for instance from the idea books (remember those?) that I never would have been able otherwise. I also got many service packs.

Years ago I began to take pictures of sets with their parts laid out like this. I gave up after three small sets.

@Huw:
Exactly. Like a biology student built it. All dissected and displayed.

@ambr:
The bevel gears can be used for 90° transfers, and aren’t limited to use in differentials. They are prone to slipping, though, so outside a dedicated gearbox of some sort, you need to make sure they’re housed in a rigid structure.

@danieltheo:
When doing professional product photography, your only concern is the photo that you end up with. Whatever happens to the product you’re shooting is an acceptable loss. Food items will often be shellacked in some manner to keep them looking fresh after hours in room temperature environments. I expect these items were placed one at a time and glued down to prevent them from moving when bumped. All it would take is to start placing them from the foreground back, and run a head of glue down the back side of each brick. The wires would be a bit trickier to glue in place, but they’d have the advantage of not having been packed for shipment, probably having heat applied to help relax any kinks in the wire, and if glued down incrementally they can be stretched to help eliminate any remaining kinks and twists.

@jsutton:
Bricks have studs. Beams have none. Liftarms are beams with one or more axle holes where beams exclusively have pin holes. And there are a lot of people who have been able to adjust to beam construction and build very complex MOCs. When you think about it, that’s exactly what set designers are doing, since they aren’t working from some mystical trove of pre-designed models.

Especially as someone who was building Bionicle MOCs during peak “That’s not real LEGO”, and who landed a nomination at Brickworld Chicago for Best Creature with a Bionicle MOC, when I hear or see people say that an older system is inherently superior to a newer one without providing concrete evidence, all it tells me is that they either can’t, or simply reduces to try to, adapt to new parts and construction techniques. This is reinforced when I regularly see evidence that other people take to these new parts and techniques like ducks to water.

So, the PF v PU situation, I’ve barely seen or heard people praise PU, and those who have seem to have not used it at large shows. People who have complain about stray Bluetooth signals (because almost everyone is carrying a device with an open Bluetooth connection in their pocket these days) creating enough interference that they have difficulty maintaining a signal, that you can’t walk away from the display with your connected phone, that the lone dedicated remote limits how you can control each type of motor, and that TLG has a miserable track record of legacy support for mobile apps. Specific complaints like those, especially echoed widely across the hobby, hold significantly more weight than a simple, “No sir, I don’t like it.”

Best Technic set ever without a B-model....

@peterlmorris said:
"The Spanish Inquisition of sets. "

I've gotta say, in terms of unexpectedness, the just-announced Horizons Tallneck thing is way more of a left-field set than a random technic parts pack.

There are what you would have called "technic beams" at that times which are now named technic bricks in the database and assigned to System platform rather than Technic.

Sets prices in 1982 was 20 DEM.

This reminds me of how timeless LEGO seems to be. I am building 10290 Pickup Truck and at least 6-8 of the exact parts shown here are used in the steering and front end.