Kdapt-Preacher

The Visual Dictionary was published in 2009 and that Yavin model wasn't recent even when it came out, so it seems unlikely to me that that concept would be relevant at all to anything they're making today. Set design 15 years ago was totally different than it is now; there's no way the designers would be taking any significant notes from anything that old. Really the only thing I have to say for this whole discussion is that none of this is based on even the slightest bit of actual information, and y'all are setting yourselves up to be disappointed again when it turns out to be, like, four square feet of Dagobah swampland or something.

BrickLink has this, although it's a little awkward to use. If you're using their Wanted List system to manage your part orders, you can enter the color as 'not applicable' and it'll get you whatever the cheapest option is. Stud.io doesn't support that, unfortunately, but you can work around it by making the invisible parts a color that doesn't exist or that doesn't otherwise appear in the model and just including a note that all parts in translucent metallic pink (or whatever) can be any color, so it's easy for somebody to change if they upload the file to BrickLink. Or you can distribute the parts list as a separate .xml file or something, which is also easy enough to do.

If I can be needlessly pedantic for a moment (who am I kidding—of course I can be!), none of the MBS sets have been anywhere near minifig scale except maybe the Cantina. They’re system-scale, which means they’re sized appropriately for minifigs to interact with them but doesn’t say anything about their literal numerical scale relative to the original vehicle (or building, or whatever). This is a narrow distinction, but it’s one that a lot of people here will get up in arms about, so we should be careful with it.

$0.25/part is way too high unless you have some very atypical selection of pieces. I usually expect something like $0.13-$0.15/part for the models I’ve designed.

It's certainly one hell of a model. I think you're going to have a difficult time marketing instructions for a model that large of a ship that's just somebody's fan design, though, even if it is Ansel Hsiao's. It's a hard sell for that level of investment if it isn't a ship that people are already familiar with. Approximately how much did it cost to build? I would guess you'd be doing well to get under $2000 or so.

"The Dark Side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural."

Damn. Well, so much for that. This is the problem with that book not being available in the US; I haven't been able to get my hands on a copy, so I don't know what it actually says other than the bits that've been transcribed to Wookieepedia. For everybody else, it's https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Encyclopedia_(De_Agostini); if anybody in this thread knows how I can get a copy of it in the US, do please tell me...

This is a bit of an exaggeration. It's probably better to say that all out-of-universe sources are canon until proven otherwise. They officially retired the idea of 'canon tiers' back in 2014, but de facto that's still clearly the system we're operating under. There have been a few specific reference books that've been treated badly (in particular, both TLJ and RoS ran completely roughshod over the material released between the movies, as part of the Sequel Trilogy's general disregard for any kind of continuity), but historically retcons have been very rare compared to the volume of new information in those books. Stuff like "Clone 1" is an obvious error, but that isn't the same as a retcon. Only her armor appeared, which only tells us that she’s approximately humanoid. We don’t know anything about what she looks like, so the other Inq there certainly could be her. That comic is set during the GCW, so probably roughly 10 years after Kenobi, so Fourth Sister was presumably still alive at this point (and also has a decade to get new armor, if what she’s wearing there doesn’t match the comic).

She's being credited as Third Sister as well. They all have 'actual' names from before they became Inquisitors, of course, although they only really come up for the ones that've been given significant backstory, which is only a handful of them so far. My guess is that the fact that she has a name attached is an indication that they'll be explicitly dealing with the fact that they all (or at least most) used to be Jedi themselves. That seems like a good bet, given that she's the one we don't know anything about. Although it's also possible that they eventually recycle numbers when they get killed. We haven't seen it happen yet, but Fourth, Sixth, and Ninth have all been dead for almost a decade by the time this is set, so who knows. That wouldn't clash with what we've seen so far as badly as having multiple with each number active at the same time. Really, the whole numbering thing introduces a ton of problems that they could've avoided. They would have a much easier time using them as villains if they hadn't so explicitly specified how many there are. That ship seems to have sailed for the moment, but given that the essentially entire Inquisition appears to have been wiped out by 2 BBY (IIRC, Third Brother/Sister is the only one that isn't known to be dead by that point), maybe it'll get rebuilt later in a way that's less narratively constraining.

This is true, but Third Brother was only mentioned in a single throwaway line in an encyclopedia entry from a book that isn’t even available for purchase in the US. It’s as obscure a reference as you can possibly get, and there’s a very compelling argument to be made that if there are actually two of each number it’s an awful coincidence that we’ve happened to see exactly one of all ten pairs without getting any duplicates so far. Until we get additional evidence there I think it’s much more likely that they’ve just retconned Third to be female; that would be a completely negligible change to canon given that the character has never actually appeared anywhere.

So I've ripped the Executor model out of Battlefront 2015. I actually purchased the game just for this, so that tells you that I'm committed to this project to the value of at least the $4.99 that I spent on it. This will be my main reference for the proportions. There's no easy way to know whether this is shaped 100% exactly like the original studio model, especially since it is scaled to 19,000 rather than 17,600 meters, but it's certainly close, and since this is itself a canonical source I think I'm fully justified in following it. However, this model isn't anywhere near detailed enough to be useful as a reference for specific detailing (it's only seen in the far distance in the game, so it's much lower-res than even typical game assets), so the studio model will still be my primary source for greeblies and texture. The main takeaway from this is that the exact measurements for the width here are slightly narrower than I'd estimated from the studio model, giving that bow point a slope of 4.40 rather than the 4.3 that I'd guessed. That's really convenient, because the 9-40-41 Pythagorean triple gives a slope of 4.44, which means that I can hugely simplify my life by basing the sides of the ship on that ratio and land within 1% of the correct width. The discrepancy will come to something like 4 studs over the 13-foot width of the model, which is ABSOLUTELY close enough even by my standards.

I would expect them to hold with just the four axles, but you'll certainly never go wrong with adding more or stronger connections. The round pieces have regular antistuds on the underside, too, so you ought to be able to add as many connection points as you want unless there's some particular reason that section can't easily align with the rest of the ship.

I have a bunch of those round pieces. The clutch parts of those axle holes are twice as thick as on a typical 2x2 round brick, effectively two plates thick instead of one, so they'll hold a lot of weight under typical applications. I may not have that many 2x2 slope bricks to build that whole thing, but I can work something out.

I must say that I don't really understand the fake rumors thing. I don't know what motivates people to post stuff like that. Sure, if it catches on you'll get a bunch of likes and attention, but pretty much by definition that only works once, and then you're basically blacklisted. I assume that most of the people who do that are children, morons, or both, but you'd think that even most of that crowd would realize that that isn't really a winning strategy even in the short term.

There has never, ever, at any time been any logic behind what legions get minifigs, going all the way back to the introduction of the idea that there are different colors. Everybody talks about how ridiculous it is that we still don't have Cody, but the rest of that first RotS wave was even weirder: in 2005 we got plain (canon but probably* not actually in the movie), 442nd Siege (canon but not actually in the movie), aerial (not canon in that form), 91st Recon (on screen for ~5 seconds), and Star Corps (on screen for ~10 seconds), but neither of the 212th or 501st, the two legions that have the most screen time in the movie. 17 years later we still don't have movie-style 501st troopers. Or the fact that across all of TCW, which showed dozens of different units, they only ever made three Phase 1 troopers other than named commanders: Wolfpack (sensible), bomb squad (?) and Horn Company (?????), instead of, again, the 212th or 501st or any of the other ones that appeared in more than one episode (or one scene in one episode, in the case of Horn Company). To my eyes, the 187th being incredibly obscure and not making any sense for LEGO to make honestly made the rumor sound more credible, because it's 100% in line with their previous policies. Which, for the record, I'm completely in favor of. *There's an interesting debate over this with a single background clone that appears to change color between shots, but suffice it to say they're not prominent.

This is the 187th Legion, which is the unit he commanded in the EU. The maroon troopers from Season 7 of TCW haven't been given a name yet, so they might be intended to replace the 187th or they may just be a different unit that he happened to be associated with on Anaxes.

I would be really impressed by a commercially available 3D printer that could put the LEGO trademark text on a print like that. There might be one out there with that kind of resolution, but boy, I follow advances in 3D printing tech reasonably closely and I have never seen a print that looks remotely that good. I don't even know what resolution we'd be talking about to imitate the text so closely that we couldn't tell the difference, but it would be unbelievably high. Maybe something like a Phrozen Sonic could do it? I don't know. I wouldn't believe it without some fairly compelling evidence. Certainly if I had access to a machine that could do that I could think of way more entertaining uses for it than making fake piece leaks.

HAH! Beautiful. Thanks for pointing that out! This is the second time in this project that a Mandalorian set has come out with the exact piece I needed just as I realized I needed it; let's hope that trend keeps up!

Between here and Discord, we have an almost perfectly even split of opinions between A and B. Soren, over on the FractalSponge Discord, pointed out an in retrospect obvious smoother version of A (the 'now' version in the image), so I think the thing to do is to go with that for the moment and leave a note on the page that I'll update the model if the actual right piece, the 4x4 plate w/ round cutout, ever gets released in light grey (the 'later' version). That piece is pretty new (introduced in 2018) and has already appeared in 71 sets, so the odds of it showing up in LBG in the reasonably near future are probably good. The 'later' version is what this is really supposed to look like; if that was an option right now there'd be no question that that's what it would be. It's also worth pointing out here (and I'll have to go into greater detail on the eventual MOC page) that the Immobilizer 418 is one of that lovely class of ship that's never been depicted in the same way twice in all the decades it's been around, so really there's a fair bit of wiggle room here. Like with my Lancer, this is going to be a composite of multiple sources to hit what I think conveys things best rather than a strict replication of a specific take on it. Obviously this is the usual four-well version rather than the weird two- or three-well ones from some very old media, but specifically this is going to be based primarily on the Empire at War version and the Essential Guide schematics, since those are the best known and most detailed. This whole section of the ship is different in some other media; in the old X-Wing games, for example, the raised part extends all the way forwards past both pairs of generators. My model is going to have 5 engines, as depicted in EaW (as opposed to 2, 3, or 8, as shown in other media), but it notably won't have the smaller secondary hangar. That hangar exists in some depictions because this was based on concept art for the Imperial-class, which is large enough to justify it, but when you scale the ship down to only 600 meters the smaller hangar becomes too small to really make sense. It's barely large enough to admit a single TIE fighter, much less a shuttle or anything useful, and at a whopping 1x1 studs there's no way it would ever be recognizable as an intentional opening on the midline of the model anyway; it would just look like I did a bad job of making the hull panels fit together. So that bit will be following the X-Wing series depiction, which lacks that.

Status update on the Immobilizer 418. I'm pretty satisfied with the overall fit of the hull, which is generally the hard part, so things are going well. At present this model is somewhat fragile; the ship isn't proportioned like an ISD, it's much thinner vertically, so there's very little space inside the hull for supports near the bow of the ship, and I'm a little worried about the lower panels sagging in the front. I think it's probably OK as it is, but I may come up with a way to strengthen it further. I'll have to build it and let it sit for a few days to see how it does. The interface between the rear generator domes and the raised section of the hull is a bit awkward, and I'd appreciate people's thoughts on it. In an ideal world, the dome would be nicely embedded in that raised bit, but there's no plate with a circular cutout large enough to make that happen (EDIT: to clarify, there is such a piece, it just doesn't exist in any shade of grey, so it doesn't buy me much for the moment). So, I have basically two options: A) Raise the dome up one plate and have an irregular cutout in the raised bit to accommodate it. This has probably the best proportions but the rough join between the raised bit and the dome is ugly; or B) Raise the dome up another plate so it's sitting on top of the raised bit. This produces a nice clean join between the dome and the raised bit, but the 'dome' becomes more of a cylinder and looks out of proportion to the one in front. Thoughts? Which one of these is the lesser of two evils? Or do you have a better solution?

This is all helpful feedback, everybody. Like I said, I'm an ecologist and not an engineer. Ultimately I think I'm going to have to order a bunch of parts to test some of these designs; the advantage of the beam that I tested was that I could build it with what I had here to actually see what it would do, but I think y'all are right about trying to maximize stud connections. This looks really good. My gut feeling agrees with yours, that a 16-stud-wide connection is going to have functionally zero horizontal flex before the point where the plates themselves just rip in half. And one advantage of that specific design is that this model is already going to use something like 5000 16x16 plates for the flat hull regions, so using those as the major component of the support beams as well would simplify the logistics of acquiring the pieces. It might only cost, say, $950K instead of $1M.

No, probably not, since the Dagobah set isn’t rumored to come with an Obi-Wan figure. If it’s for Star Wars at all it might be in a Kenobi set.

That piece has the LEGO trademark bit, which is there explicitly to make it an enormous pain to fake, so I definitely think it's real in the sense that it actually exists and came out of a LEGO factory. Bear in mind, though, that doesn't mean that it's going to be used to make a Force ghost, or that it will appear in any given upcoming set. Prototype pieces cast in random colors do pop up occasionally, like those red Darth Vader helmets you see around sometimes. It certainly could be a Force ghost, but it's also conceivable that that mold was created for something else entirely and won't even be widely produced in trans light blue.

Did an actual structural test. This beam design is roughly 10x10 studs and weighs about 0.5 lbs/foot. A 48-inch span of that beam loaded with 19 pounds of books at the center sagged approximately one inch. I think that's an encouraging result. Assuming a larger version of the beam had a similar Young's modulus (which I think it would?), that implies that the 40-stud version could support 100 lbs over a two-meter span and only sag about 2 mm. I'm playing seriously fast and loose with units here, so IDK whether that would really work out that way in practice, but I feel good for having done some kind of math. And that's completely unsupported; having some kind of cross-brace at the middle shouldn't be too hard and ought to improve things even more, since the amount of sag is (theoretically) proportionate to the cube of beam thickness.

Discord is not one of my primary social media platforms, so it's typically not an ideal place to try to talk to me (I'm on this forum basically every day, but I might not see a Discord message for months). But I'll see what it's like. I'll go pretty far out of my way for good orthographic pictures of starships...