A Rover You Can Afford. Overview of the Designer With Aliexpress

I bought this rover for my son last New Year. Yes, and how not to buy: a small price, an abun­dance of parts and the prospect of dilut­ing tank bat­tles with the explo­ration of oth­er plan­ets — every­thing came togeth­er here. So if you are look­ing for an inex­pen­sive but inter­est­ing Christ­mas gift, then this might be the one for you.

The review of the con­struc­tor will not be large, but you will under­stand what to expect from it. To my regret, when I start­ed writ­ing a review, it turned out that some of the pho­tos from unpack­ing and assem­bly were gone. But you will see the main and most impor­tant thing.

This is where the lost pho­tos are. How­ev­er, you would not see any­thing impor­tant on them. As is the case with Aliex­press design­ers, the rover con­sist­ed of sev­er­al num­bered pack­ages (good) and a man­u­al, pulled togeth­er in a com­mon cocoon.

The man­u­al is good: visu­al and with high-qual­i­ty print­ing. You will see this in the fol­low­ing pho­tos.

The same goes for details. Cast­ing is good, full com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with the orig­i­nals. There is noth­ing new here, for many years of assem­bling block design­ers with Aliex­press, I only came across a frank, mon­strous bot­tom a cou­ple of times. The price tag was at the lev­el of qual­i­ty and I just real­ized that you should not chase frankly desh­man and name­less design­ers. It’s bet­ter to read the reviews.

It is worth not­ing that among the abun­dance of com­plete­ly ordi­nary details, there was some­thing pre­vi­ous­ly unseen — a short soft anten­na.

The rover itself con­sists of three parts.

1. descent mod­ule with a solar pan­el sock­et (by the way, if this top­ic is inter­est­ing, then here is an overview of the most pow­er­ful solar pan­el from Aliex­press

2. research mod­ule cart

3. gen­er­a­tor, aka com­mu­ni­ca­tion sta­tion, aka parts fab­ri­ca­tor — think of it as any­thing depend­ing on the game require­ments

Here they are all assem­bled. Ay, looks good, good.

The most struc­tural­ly com­plex, and there­fore inter­est­ing part. Oh, by the way, here you can see the instruc­tions. Pay atten­tion — small details there are tak­en out by sep­a­rate foot­notes.

But! Why the gag here is this col­or of plas­tic? This iri­des­cent shiny plas­tic imme­di­ate­ly remind­ed me of the fig­urines of all sorts of mutants and mon­sters, which I cut myself into in the year 92.

Detail­ing is good. So all this under­bel­ly is hid­den and, with the excep­tion of slid­ing sup­ports, does not par­tic­i­pate in the game. And yet there is a radar at the very bot­tom, there are still some pro­trud­ing things.

In addi­tion to the radar, there are also bells for shunt­ing engines.

Okay, I’ll throw a fly in the oint­ment too. The sup­ports are quite tight and con­struc­tive­ly made com­pe­tent­ly in every­thing except for the discs them­selves with peeps. On a smooth sur­face, they sim­ply slide, too small a ful­crum.

How­ev­er, the over­all design is inter­est­ing and not banal.

Above is a plat­form for the research mod­ule and a retractable lad­der for it.

The detail­ing of the descent mod­ule is excel­lent! There are all sorts of box­es, appli­ances.

By the way, if you notice loose­ly fit­ting cubes some­where, it’s not because they don’t match well — it’s the son who doesn’t press them tight­ly. The details, I repeat, are com­plete­ly sim­i­lar to the orig­i­nal and fall into place as they should.

Of course, a remote lad­der deliv­ers sep­a­rate­ly, along which the rover moves down

And here there is a plug, which prompt­ed me to move the “fab­ri­ca­tor-gen­er­a­tor” into a sep­a­rate part of the con­struc­tor. If you put it as it should be, on top, then there is sim­ply no room for a research mod­ule. Well, non­sense, frank non­sense. I have spent in fact a lot of time try­ing to fig­ure out what I could be doing wrong. Well, the cre­ators could not score so much. Every­thing fits in pro­mo pho­tos. In the end, it turned out that they just chose a good angle. It is impos­si­ble to com­bine the mod­ule and the gen­er­a­tor in one place.

Here is this fab­ri­ca­tor clos­er

Okay, no prob­lem. For the dura­tion of the descent, I sim­ply pushed it to the very back of the mod­ule, where it fits per­fect­ly and does not inter­fere with the rover

Tech­ni­cal­ly, they should be han­dled by sci­en­tists (they were in the kit, I remem­ber), but now they are busy with a much more press­ing prob­lem, the zomb­i­fi­ca­tion of sol­diers. Turn­ing off the neo­cor­tex and lim­bic, forc­ing the rep­til­ian brain and ATP — you know, they have no end of work. Zom­bie rit­u­al Zom­bie rit­u­al!

The stairs them­selves are good. And they move and bend. Here, the more mov­ing parts the design­er has, the more inter­est­ing the game­play, of course.

And here is the rover itself. In fact, this is a wheeled cart with “wings” of solar pan­els and a long neck with cam­eras.

The neck, by the way, pret­ty much resem­bles the famous Spiel­berg char­ac­ter. Old­er peo­ple and fans of NF in gen­er­al will under­stand who we are talk­ing about.

Tires were, of course, on all 6 wheels, but my son took them off for some oth­er crafts, I did not waste time find­ing them for the sake of com­plete­ness.

By the way, yes. A won­der­ful chil­dren’s night light based on “My Neigh­bor Totoro” lit up in the back­ground. High­ly rec­om­mend. A cozy and pleas­ant light thing with 2 bright­ness lev­els.

The pan­els move in dif­fer­ent direc­tions and fold. Sim­i­lar­ly, by the way, they move, fold and rotate the radar with the “neck”

Well, that’s all in the col­lec­tion, there is even quite a muse­um stand-tablet with the name of the moon rover.

If you are inter­est­ed, here are the remain­ing and not includ­ed in the review pho­tos

If the same Bell Osprey tiltro­tor becomes a chal­lenge for a child with­out much assem­bly expe­ri­ence, then the rover will be an ide­al gift in terms of price, com­plex­i­ty and game­play. Actu­al­ly, I just list­ed all its advan­tages.

There is only one minus — no gift, no box. But, one has only to start col­lect­ing and this ques­tion will go away alto­geth­er. Some­where for a cou­ple of hours the child will be busy, then the game will take some more time.

Well, after the game, he will take his right­ful place on the shelf.

You can buy this rover here on Aliex­press

You can save on pur­chas­es with coupons and pro­mo­tion­al codes from the dis­count chan­nel in telegram, see the link to it below in the “about the author” block