VK-318

That's a rubber Vampire Squid, a projectile from the Bionicle theme's Barraki series of sets.

How about using a 1x1 control panel element and a lever piece? Is there space for that to work?

Wow. This is the first Neo-Classic Capital Ship I've seen so far, and it's definitely worthy of the genre. If you're looking to include more trans-yellow, maybe filling in those square headlight brick holes would be a good start. But this is already a thrilling build as it is. Good work!

Actually, Bob De Quatre is working on launching a Sci-Fi RPG. He has said to expect it to resemble SoNE from the Star Wars forum rather more than GoH, due to the massive number of judges and GM's needed to keep GoH running smoothly. SoNE is significantly lower-maintenance, so while GoH will still be a guiding star, as it was in the development of SoNE, this Sci-Fi game will not be merely a GoH science fiction.

My second Lego Star Wars set was a later version of this (updated TIE Advanced but no changes to the Y-Wing that I remember). That Y-wing is one of my all-time favorite models.

Be sure to follow this thread, then, because when Bob De Quatre gets this game online we'll need to start finding players!

All right, Bob De Quatre, time for a status update. Is everything proceeding?

Not quite true. LEGO has started using skeletons, orcs, goblins, and so forth as Castle villains more and more. They still use humans but they are using them rather less and less. And Star Wars is a special case. The story is already written, and Lego has to use the characters handed to them.

No, it's a highly sophisticated interlocking brick system. Maybe this conversation has diverged into two distinct conversations? The question of which sets are worthy of collection for display purposes and which sets aren't is different from the question of which sets are UCS. Not to say that it isn't a good question - I, for instance, like to collect Star Wars microships, like the old Mini-sets and the newer Planet series, while others like to collect UCS series, or all the sets of a given ship, or belonging to a given faction, or including a certain character, or whatever. Maybe someone should start a thread about collecting habits in general, since the "Show your Army/Navy/Collection" thread just wants pictures, not discussion. Let's just keep the debate, wherever and whatever it happens to be, friendly, okay? At times, the tone here has been pretty tense, and let's all remember that the user who started this thread is a brand-new user, who probably has worthwhile contributions to make to the Eurobricks Star Wars Forum and the community at large, and discouraging him or her with acrid comments over a question of largely personal preference is hardly in anyone's best interest. Back to the original point of the conversation, where do MOC UCS sets place in the mix? There's Cavegod's mammoth AT-AT, and Anio has designed at least a dozen models , including an AT-AT of his own, the Tantive VII (Anio's stated personal favorite, and mine as well ), a 74-Z speederbike, an AAT, and a Venator-class Star Destroyer. The UCS label is often applied to these MOCs. So, are they UCS? I personally consider UCS to include all the sets LEGO identifies as such, (though the bridge in the Executor does kinda give me pause ) as well as a handful of MOC's that are both built to the same exacting standards of accuracy and detail and are widely regarded by others as being worthy of the honor of UCS-ness. Of course, UCS sets must be Star Wars. I had entirely forgotten about that Batmobile until 1974 brought it up, and I'm still not sure what to think about it. For purposes of this discussion, I'm going to use "UCS" to refer to Star Wars stuff only. Batman only complicates things. By the way, I hope you all got the LEGO Movie quote at the beginning. I'm not making any implications or arguing with anyone there; the joke was just too good to resist at almost midnight where I am sitting.

Thread resurrection! But absolutely worth it. The third-generation Corvette is far and away my favorite, and I tried to build a MOC of it a while back. Did all right, I guess, but nowhere near this beauty. This really is terrific.

Saw an 8028 Mini TIE Fighter hanging with some newer polybags in the checkout aisle of a local Target and snapped it up. It's ugly enough that I suppose it makes sense for the thing to loiter around since late 2012, but I like to collect the various microscale Star Wars sets.

Delicious! I must do something like this for my Spyrius guys ...

As you can see, hallonsylt, what defines UCS is highly personal. Most broadly UCS includes all the sets branded as UCS, as well as a few very early sets like the original UCS X-wing. It can also be more narrowly defined by one's particular taste. If you're going for a complete collection and collect the broadest definition, you're no one can really argue with you (and as I look at the discussion above, preventing argument might be a priority ). But if you feel otherwise, go right ahead! It's your money and your collection. Be forewarned, by the way, that a lot of the older sets can cost an arm and a leg when purchased as a set. There's a topic on Eurobricks here about buying and building some of these sets part by part; Bricklink is a great source for parts and sets at a pretty reasonable price.

You know, if you enjoy this sort of thing, you could sign up to join the Empire ...

Thanks for the tips! To your points about the walker build, I did try to the 1x2 tile with click hinge you're talking about, but the stud felt out of place. In retrospect, though, it still probably would have worked better. And with the claws, I certainly will try to make more use of those sorts of minifig accessories in the future. I have a pretty basic selection of real minifigs here, so those parts just aren't the first things to come to mind - yet. The vegetation is, I freely admit, pathetic. Plants aren't my strong suit, and at the time I used this method I had just spent an hour trying to position the shredder the way I wanted it and was kind of short on patience. No excuse, to be sure, but that's the way it went. I tried your first method for fixing that gap. I don't remember why I didn't use it - I think I changed the design of the columns once or twice after I tried it before returning to this, and by that time I had forgotten all about it. I really like the solution involving the 2x2 round tiles. Only problem? I didn't know they existed. I wish I had, though. That would be the perfect fix for that gap. Again, thanks for the compliments, they are much appreciated. Thanks for the tips, they will be put to good use both in and out of SoNE. And thanks again for the renders, since I am possibly the leading procrastinator of SoNE and might will never have gotten around to them at all.

Here's to a bit more of a challenge! Honestly, half the fun is in waiting for the judges to finish scoring an episode and finding out who won. Hopefully this episode's Imperial tour de force will inspire the Rebels to make a more universal effort.

Great build, you're very good at the "underground" look. But, um ... aftermath of what? I think I missed something here.

I was wondering how long it would take somebody to get their hands on one of these and mod it. I love that you added a landing gear (pictures please? ). I agree that the Ghost is a really great ship; it looks very appropriate for the OT period.

I agree, it did turn out all right. Great use of some pretty awkward pieces. If it had some trans-light blue or trans-blue tiles to cover those studs on the outside of the side pods, it would make a pretty good Star Trek MOC.

To deeplink an image (which is what you were trying to do and should be doing) you use the "Image" button in the topic editor. Here's how: At the bottom right of your first post in this topic (the one you just made and couldn't get images into) there is a button labelled "Edit." Click it. This will open the post editor, which will look a whole lot like what you used to write the post. Now look for a moment at the tools at the top of the editor. The editor has two rows of tools that start on the left side and end about halfway across the editor. Look at the bottom row of tools. There are six tools for modifying your font (the bold, italic, underscore, strikethrough, subscript, and superscript tools), a tool for bulleted lists and a tool for numbered lists, a tool marked with a chain and a small green circle for adding links, and a greyed-out tool showing the middle of three links of chain being broken that's used to "unlink" (I have no idea what this actually does, because I've never used it). The next tool, the eleventh in line, looks like a tiny picture of a tree, and it's the "Image" tool. To use it, just click on it. It will open a dialogue box with a lot of empty space and a place for you to enter the URL of your picture. This does, of course, require that your picture be stored on a website already, but it sounds like you've got that taken care of already. So, all you do is place the link to the image (not the page on which the image appears, but the image itself - for instance, on Brickshelf you can find this by just clicking on the image until you get to a page that is blank except for the image in the upper left corner of the browser) in the space provided for it and click "Okay." The dialogue box will close, and the image will appear wherever your cursor was in the text before you clicked the "Image" tool. Note that your cursor will appear to be as long as the image is tall, because it shows up right after the image. Don't worry, your font size is still the same. Let me demonstrate: There is text on either side of this image. The cursor here is freakishly huge, but my font is the same and the text is half-way up the image. See what I mean? Some of the other, more experienced Eurobricks users have some way to add a nice little caption along with their images. I haven't figured out how they do that, so I just write my caption on the line under the image, lined up with the image using lots and lots of spaces.

Yikes! I paid RRP for mine back when it came out, and I do think it was worth it, so you, sir, have just gotten the Lego bargain of the year! Bought 75017 Geonosian Duel and 75025 Jedi Defender-Class Cruiser. The cruiser is a parts and minifig pack, and 75017 is primarily for the terrific Dooku minifig and to take advantage of a sale at the local Toys'R'Us.

I think you're right about that. The old LEGO Space stuff was rooted in the popular Sci-Fi of the times. The original Classic Space came out during the heyday of Star Trek and space operas (a la Star Wars, and similar stuff). My personal favorite sci-fi literature is Asimov's Foundation trilogy. But these days science fiction means stuff like The Hunger Games, and whether you like it or not you have to admit that it's not about the technology, or the adventure, it's about human psychology. Not an easy subject to tackle with LEGO's, and that may be responsible for the current quandary LEGO seems to be in, not just with Space but with most of its products. Part of the reason LEGO is not returning the multi-theme system of the early days of LEGO Space is that they are trying to sell to kids. This may have been said already, and if so I apologize for repeating the obvious. The age 8-12 (or so) child is LEGO's target market for Galaxy Squad, but they also need to consider how to make it easy for kids to convince parents to buy these sets. If there are both good guys and bad guys in the set, parents can probably get away with just buying one set for their kid. Though LEGO would obviously like to sell more sets to each family, they probably reason that the parents will be more pleased with the experience, and thus more likely to come back for the next birthday or Christmas (or other holiday involving the giving of gifts) if they can walk out of the store with just one box rather than two or three or more. And lest we criticize LEGO for focusing too closely on young children, remember that most of us probably became AFOL's because we played with LEGO's as kids. By selling to kids, LEGO keeps its market growing. By focusing on adults, they would become quite vulnerable to missing out on too much of a generation of kids, and remember that one of the biggest reasons parents buy their kids LEGO's is because they themselves played with LEGO's as a kid. Cwetqo has another excellent point: If LEGO Space themes are so popular, maybe we should organize a Lego Ideas project for the kind of parts collection we have been talking about for the last couple of topic pages. Maybe start a new topic for it? But before anyone tries that, I would we would like to hear some input and opinions from some of the more veteran builders here (and from other forums - Rufus from Special Themes, for instance [anybody remember his Classic Space Restoration Project?]) on such a concept.

Me, too! Didn't spot that right away, but it definitely does have a Halo look to it.

I'm no expert, but I don't see much to critique. That's a very nice, smooth design, and I especially like the way you've arranged all those fins at the back.

I think you have a very important point there. It takes a lot more pieces to create a good neo-classic item (in any space theme) than it took to make one of the older ones. And many of those parts are more decorative than structural. This means that if Lego, as they must in order to make a profit, limits the piece count of a rebooted space set, it must either limit either the decoration, in which case the set will miss what they consider to be their most important target demographic, or limit the capacity for secondary models/mods/mocs. Not a pretty trade-off, is it? And since, on the whole, AFOL's, myself included, tend to complain a lot when they think things are overpriced, Lego will have to keep the piece count down in order to make a profit. Given this, I think they might indeed do best to just produce batches of structural and printed parts (and hopefully appropriate magnets and minifigs) for CS, Futuron, Blacktron I (and/or II), Spyrius, M:Tron, Space Police I/II/III, and so forth. Now, if somebody could turn that concept into a Lego Ideas project ...