Kdapt-Preacher

I have never seen that helmet before and have no actual inside knowledge of any kind, but my uninformed guess is that it's a recent custom, and the weirdness is because it's meant to be this specific storm commando or something based on the same armor. Most depictions of the storm commandos have them in black versions of regular scout helmets, but some have that more vertical mouth and lack the bulge around the lower back, which would be a pretty good fit for your helmet there.

OK, update on the photos: Apparently Imgur detected an unspecified violation of their content policy on my account, which hadn't uploaded any pictures in the previous six months, and they reacted to that by deleting everything I'd ever posted there without even so much as notifying me that it had happened. Their support people are unable to tell me what the alleged violation was or how to prevent it in the future, and they say they're unable to recover any of the removed content, and effectively that if I have a problem with that I should megabluck off and die. (And then week after this conversation they sent me a spam email celebrating the tenth anniversary of my creating the account.) So I have deleted my Imgur account, and I would very strongly encourage anyone else who's using them to back up all your stuff and then find a different image hosting service. I've restored the main render on the first post of this thread, but I'll have to see about replacing all the other image links; I imagine I still have most of those files saved locally in various places, but it'd be a huge pain to have to track them all down again.

Something seems to be wrong with my Imgur account, which is why most of the photos in this thread are currently dead links, for anyone wondering. I'm working on sorting it out.

Hmmm. 3386 is a good idea. I'd been thinking about a vertical clip so the B-wing could fly 'upright' with the knife blade downwards, but holding it horizontally like that is about as good. I definitely like the bucket and clip better for the X-wing, but they're all just difficult to make readable at this size. It's pure happy coincidence that the TIE fighters happen to work out as nicely as they do; basically no other starfighter is that cooperative.

Yeah, I think Guam is going to be great. Tons of crabs out there! The timing is just very awkward. As for the B-wing, the knife piece (44658) is about the right size. The stand would have to be kind of comically bulky compared to the ship, of course...

There's good precedent for new helmets in battle packs specifically, too. The ARF trooper in 2011, ARC trooper in 2012, First Order officer cap in 2016, patrol trooper in 2018, Praetorian Guard in 2019, Imperial commando from just earlier this year, etc., plus 4-LOM's head in 2017, and the macrobinoculars from the 501st BP last year, which is another one that the clone crowd has wanted for a long time. Being in a battle pack definitely does not mean they won't do Bacara justice.

Aaaaaand..... I'm moving to Guam. Immediately. Still in the US, technically, but no better than Australia was from a LEGO standpoint (actually worse, since there are LEGO stores in Australia and there aren't any in Guam. And the cost of shipping anything will be ridiculous). I'm not going to have time to finish the Venator or probably anything else. Sigh. IDK. I'll try to come up with some better solution so I can continue building MOCs in the future; I've hated not really being able to work on this project for the last two years, but it doesn't look like it's going to immediately improve.

The skirt piece might be better, but it still doesn't address the biggest issue with the Royal Guards, which is that their robes are supposed to conceal their arms. Even though the skirt piece is probably closer to a literal representation of the uniform, I'm not sure it conveys the overall impression as well. It would make them look like the Praetorians. I can't see LEGO doing it, but the better solution IMO would be to give them either a new headpiece that extends down over the torso and legs (like the old ghost minifigures) or a bespoke cape piece that wraps around the body more than the current ones do.

Not in the original Thrawn Trilogy, but more so in Outbound Flight and the other media around that. By the time of Heir to the Empire he's been an Imperial for decades and has largely worked out his ethical issues, but the younger versions of him have more of that angle. Depending on how they played it, it could have been less about the survivors not being believed and more about them just not having any useful information. The Vong aren't particularly communicative; you could easily have a storyline where the TCW crew encounters and fights a YV scout ship but never really learns much about them other than that they're a previously-unencountered aggressive faction. In more LEGO-related discussion, this is still the 2024 thread. Is a 2025 thread going to open at some point?

Ah, perfect--that's just what I needed. Odd that this is necessary, since it seems like something Studio could've addressed on their end more easily than requiring a third-party tool, but at least there's a solution. Thank you!

At some point in the last year or so, BrickLink (or possibly LDraw, or possibly both) have updated their ID numbers for some common parts. Most prominently, #3023 Plate 1x2 has split into 3023a and 3023b to reflect mold variants, but something similar has been done to #3069 Tile 1x2 and several other pieces as well. That's all well and good, but the result is that now my older Stud.io files that have all the 1x2 plates as just #3023 rather than #3023b can no longer be imported into BrickLink because it doesn't recognize the pieces. This is an issue because I've published several hundred MOCs on Rebrickable with Stud.io files for instructions and now I have people messaging me about the files being broken. I can fix this by going through every file manually and replacing all the existing parts with the new variants, but that would take days of work. Is there any way to convert them en masse, or to make BrickLink translate #3023 to #3023b automatically (which seems like how this ought to work, anyway)? Thanks!

Celebrating the release of Skeleton Crew (only a week late), we have #208, the Onyx Cinder! Pretty straightforward little model, but I think it's ended up being a pretty good representation of the ship. In more substantial news, after more than 18 months away I am finally back in the US and have access to my parts collection again, so at long last I should be able to start making progress on MOCs again! I have a lot of IRL work to do at the moment, so it's not going to be an immediate giant burst of stuff, but I'm optimistic that I'll be able to get things rolling again in the near future. It's past time to get the Venator finished.

There's a lot of stuff that could maybe be done to make it sturdier, but the spacing is very awkward. To achieve the 12-degree angle between segments the clips are offset relative to each other by half a plate (not half a stud, half a plate) both horizontally and vertically, which isn't trivial to achieve with anything other than clips. I think this will hold up, but of course there's no way to know for sure if it'll hold without testing it IRL. Have to see.

Long time no update, and this still isn't much of an update since I'm still in Australia, still have no physical bricks, etc., etc. But I've been brainstorming on the Eye of Sion a bit and I've got a version that's reasonably round, reasonably thin, and I think will be sturdy enough to support the weight of the back end of the UCS ISD. I haven't been able to test that theory yet, due to the repeatedly mentioned Australia thing, but this is what I'm looking at at the moment. Just the ring is already almost 3000 pieces before I've even started on the engines, stand, and connection to the ISD (which I think I have a reasonably solid plan for), and it'll need more greebling than it currently has, too. The Eye might end up being more pieces than the ISD itself. Although the Peridea Chimaera version of the ISD would have a lot more pieces than the regular one due to all the damage detailing, so that might still be more.

Australia is lovely. In my non-LEGO time I'm a marine ecologist, so I came to Australia to see the Great Barrier Reef and look at all your crabs, which you have a lot more of than we do in the US. The Indo-Pacific is the global center for crab biodiversity (just about all marine biodiversity, really), so there's a ton of stuff to do here, and it has not disappointed. I've seen upwards of a hundred new species of decapods in the last year, which is pretty hard to argue with as far as I'm concerned.

Not really, unfortunately. The update is that I'm still in Australia and won't have access to physical bricks again for at least another six months (and maybe longer, depending on various factors). I've taken the Venator about as far as I can digitally; I don't think I can do much more with it until I've physically held it and can tell how well the internals actually hold up, and in particular how well the dorsal hull panels mesh with the bridge towers and superstructure around the back of the ship. I think I may have too much open space around the engines, but Stud.io can't really tell me that. So, rest assured that I am eventually going to finish it, but it's going to be a while yet, until I'm either back in the US or in a longer-term situation here.

Alright, finally, here we are: #207, the MC30c frigate! Substantially the same as the previously posted version, but incorporating the feedback from The-yukio and TeddytheSpoon (thanks guys!), and with some slight color changes because it turns out that 1x1 stadium tile doesn't actually exist in dark tan.

It's taken me seven months, but I have found an example, and it's even in a Star Wars set: they used one for 4-LOM's faceplate in the 2010 Celebration exclusive set. So like I said in October, that's immediate full approval for the turntables as far as I'm concerned; that's clearly the right way to do it. I should go back and look at my Immobilizer 418 model too, probably, since that has a couple of places where those boat stud 2x2s are currently used where they don't hold particularly well. Sorry for the very delayed response. It'll be approximately 98 studs long (~79cm, 31 inches).

For whatever it's worth, I've been following LEGO Star Wars closely since 2006, and while individual sets have always been somewhat hit or miss, on the whole I think the theme is doing about as well as it ever has been. There have certainly been stylistic changes over the years, so it's totally fair to have a personal preference for the style that was prevalent in a particular era (there's a lot of nostalgia for the style that was introduced around 2007 that coincided with the big burst of TCW sets, for instance), but I don't think it's accurate to say that that reflects the theme itself dipping in quality. There are some trends that I'd like to see reversed (e.g., I'd like to go back to having more battle packs), but there are also trends that I love (e.g., this is absolutely the best era for UCS sets that LSW has ever had). Things come and go. And this forum has been mad about about it the entire time, LMAO. Even back in what a lot of folks today think of as the 'golden age' the community here had the exact same concerns about PPP, what figures should've been included, too many stickers, models too small, etc. as we see today.

There are a ton of people cosplaying as the Narkina V prisoners, though. It definitely didn't have as much new content as Rogue One, but what it had is making a splash (so to speak...).

The bottom half is definitely used on its own (in 10256 Taj Mahal, for example, and probably other places), but I can't think of any examples of the top half either. I dunno. Very much a grey area. I don't use minifigure hands, personally--I know the majority of the community is cool with that, but it always seemed like a bit of a bridge too far for me. Using the turntables isn't as far, but I'm still not completely comfortable with it. I may get over it. We'll see. In the meantime, I fully support anybody else using the turntables if they prefer. I've been looking and haven't come up with an example of them being used separately in an official set. If you can think of one, that would make up my mind immediately. In the meantime I'll think about exactly where I draw the line here. If I decide that it's legit, then I'd definitely consider replacing the boat studs on the Immobilizer; you're almost certainly right that they'd work better for some of those angle plates. It's moot for the moment since I'm not going to be able to make any structural changes to anything until I'm back in the US and have access to my physical bricks again anyway, but if you have the Immobilizer assembled and want to make that change I would completely encourage you to do so.

That's a good thought. They have full-size studs. I've never used those for anything, but they'd probably do the job. Do they ever come from LEGO disarticulated from the base? I'd be curious whether disassembling them is technically illegal.

Hmm. I interpreted The-yukio's post differently, I think. The way I read it, the connection to between the wedge plate and the main body of the ship is fine (via the 1x1 bracket that's already next to the one you've got in purple there), but the issue is the 2x2 boat stud immediately behind it. Those boat studs are always problematic; the studs on them aren't quite full-sized (they're clipped to accomodate the circular shape), so they don't have the same hold as a regular stud with some pieces.

Ah, excellent information--that's exactly the kind of thing it's hard to figure out from the Stud.io file. Thank you for testing it! In the short term I can think of two relatively non-invasive fixes. Option A is to replace the 1x2 tile there with a 1x2 plate and add a 1x2 ingot to connect that to the 2x2 wedge, which gives it a second point of contact to the 2x2 inverted tile. Option B is to replace the 1x2 tile and the 2x2 wedge with a single 2x2 plate, and then use a pair of curved slopes on top of that to get the wedge shape back. Both of those would apply to the rear fin just as easily if need be. I think they'd both be sturdier than what we started with, but neither one looks quite as good IMO; they've lost a bit of the smoothness there. I'll put some thought into reinforcing that area from the underside. There isn't a lot of room there, but it might be possible to take a chunk out of the ship's spine without losing too much structural integrity.

It's this 5x5 dish. I don't completely love it, since it's a lot more pointed than that part of the station actually is; I'd rather have a 5x5 radar dish. But there isn't a 5x5 radar dish, and I don't think the 4x4 radar dish looks right (it shows off way too much of the transparent dish underneath it). That's part of why I'm not totally convinced this is actually a workable idea. But by all means, play around with it; you may well get it working better than I have here.