Sethra

A propos sturdy: the main engines are not - the bottom one keeps falling off when I work on the model and it wobbles slightly ;). It seems to be attached only at two studs, and is very hard to securely reattach without breaking further stuff when the engine section is already closed. Thus, I still keep one side open at the moment. Might have to glue it in the end for secure transportation. Otherwise, I'm making great progress: The engine section looks just great, photos don't to it justice, it's much better in reality. Finally, I'm now also happy with the stability of the stands after a small modification. The small one below the pods has to bear really a lot of weight, and the manual suggests to attach it at the fragile tan-colored laser battery / warhead launcher. For me, this created some problems. First, as the laser battery is not really designed for bearing weight, it kept breaking when I was building the top of the frigate, as even a little bit of extra force was too much for it. Second, you could actually see some distortion in the frame due to uneven balance of the weight. Both was not really promising for long-term stability. Thus, I decided to attach the stand directly below the load-bearing technic liftarms instead: The problems immediately vanished, and I believe the model is now more stable with a better distribution of forces. For me, it works better than the original solution, but this might really depend on your overall construction. Cheers and happy building everyone.

From what I know of my build, I think this solution might be too flimsy - just below these two liftarms is the back stand, and they have to carry the full weight of the engine section, as there will be no more support structure otherwise. Correction: There's two more LA going down a bit further in the front, so it should be ok I guess.

Oops, now that I checked LDD and compared, I noticed that I made a mistake at the front section, which caused the correct attachment point of the pillar to be covered by the slopes. I was already very much in doubt if it's intended that the model just rests on it without any real connection. Hope I can fix it without having to tear too much apart again. The current resting place is just temporary to keep it out of the way of everyday life - for further assembly, it will be of course moved somewhere more accessible ;).

Finally managed to finish the bottom and turned it the right way around and on the stands (I think it's possible on your own, but definitely vastly easier with help). In the end, this order of building the Nebulon worked out quite well - you have to fiddle around a lot to get all the pods into place, and I was very happy that the model rested very securely on the back side. Now that it's on the stands, it feels a bit wobbly, although I think there is no real risk of it falling over - you need to apply quite a bit of lateral force to topple it. Still, I'm thinking about gluing the stands onto a heavy wooden plate to make it feel more stable. Not that I live in an earthquake area, but you never know ;). One thing I would like to clear up is the height of the stands - I wonder what is really necessary here, as I do not want to have unnecessary strain on the model. When I tried to build the pillars according to manual, the front one was not tall enough - it carried no weight at all, and the front was sagging downwards. I had to add two plates to the front pillar and remove one from the small stand below the pods - now it at least looks straight at first glance, and the weight seems to be evenly distributed. Might change when everything settles down though. Should be about two-thirds done now, didn't count hours but it was vastly slower than the record ;).

Sadly, I do not have the luxury of a Lego room, so I have to set up and remove the build every evening I'm working on it again. Thus, I could only kind of pre-sort the parts into different bags, and stuff proceeds slowly. Doesn't matter, having tons of fun :). I rearranged build order a bit since I did not have all parts when I started - essentially skipped the top section, turned the model on the back and will finish the bottom before I will put it on the stands. Hope this will work out. Otherwise, everything went smoothly with the manual until I had to put in the two small blue technic liftarms visible on the left here. This turned out to be completely impossible given the current state of the build (you might get an idea about the chicken-and-egg-problem from the picture). I had to basically tear apart half of the back section again and found only one build order which works, and it was not that from the manual ;). No idea how other people managed this so far. Not complaining myself, I enjoyed the challenge, but if you ever touch the manual again you might want to reorder the build so that it is actually physically possible. Anyway, I'd like to report one error in the parts list and maybe warn other builders. The little subsection built on manual pages 145-149 is NOT in the LDD file, and the parts are as far as I can see also missing from the parts list. I did a careful inventory and definitely have everything from the parts list, but for this very small section two of the necessary slopes are now missing for me. It is extremely unlikely that this can be attributed to chance. Second little error, very easy to spot but might also transfer to the parts list as it's also wrong in LDD: on page 165 one should insert a double-sided pin so that one can actually attach this subsection to the main model. Thanks again for your efforts in publishing this, it's wonderful to see the model grow and from LDD without the instructions it would be a nightmare to build it ;).

Here we go, also a truly antiquated description ;). http://www.bubblegum-cards.com/Star-Wars-3/imagepages/image47.html

Too short - 150m is the Corellian Corvette, which he also already suggested being built a few posts before ;). No idea where the quote is from though.

Note to self: to learn how to work with Bricklink, it is not a good idea to start with a model consisting of that many different parts ;). Anyway, for the Europeans: have ordered about 80% of the parts now in shops around here (including what I believe to be all of the rare/more expensive ones), so far paid 800 Euro including shipping (could probably have saved 50 Euro or so by being more experienced with Bricklink). So barring surprises, total will be sub 1000 Euro (but not by much). Now have to wait for all orders to arrive to see which parts I'm still missing, as when I tried to apply the last order to my wishlist everything exploded for some reason. Btw thanks phaelon for the list with changes, was very helpful.

Is there already an erratum for 76302 Hose, Rigid 3mm D. 10L / 8.0 cm? Sorry if I missed that, it looks like either the part number should be something else or the description is wrong. Thanks!

Tweaked version looks indeed much better, can't wait for the instructions ! Quick question: will these updates already be included in the manual and parts list, or was the model of the previous thread frozen for this? Guess you have to draw a line somewhere ;).

Just fell in love for the second time, just like when I saw the first version - absolutely stunning model of my most favourite capital ship. Thanks a lot for sharing, and I'm looking forward to the instructions so I can start building one - will give it a try even if it takes me years ;).

Even bigger and more detail sounds great - looking forward to the new model <3. I really hope I'll be able to get all parts for this once it's released, first time I'll try to bricklink something - will probably be a project keeping me entertained for some months ;).

There is hope \o/. I was just in the process to increase my post count to 10 so I can PM too, but looks like you beat me to it ;). Thanks for your work on this Mortesv, much appreciated.

Didn't see anything yet about any SW UCS coming out next year - did I miss that, or are there indeed no announcements/rumors yet?

Very impressive set - got to try and get one for christmas before the lego brick shortage hits ;).

Registered just to post in this thread so that it does not become forgotten - I'd really love to build this model, looks amazing. I do hope there will be an LDD file available at some point, it's my favourite ship from the Star Wars universe (from hours of X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter) and I could never design one on my own. Also, if you upload the LDD, do not hesitate to provide a Paypal link for donations, I'd be happy to contribute !