Kdapt-Preacher

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about. There's nothing AotC related except the single accessory pack, but now we have two pages of talk about an AT-TE that isn't happening and people think there's a whole wave of it.

You're certain of that on the basis of what, exactly? This goes for everybody in this thread. Yes, the MBS (if it's an MBS) certainly might be Endor, but you have literally zero grounds to think that it is other than that that's what you want and "it would make sense". People are already getting hyped for an AT-TE and Gunship on the basis of the accessory pack--remember how the AotC battle pack in 2018 foreshadowed the AT-TE coming that summer? No? That's because it didn't happen, because LEGO doesn't always coordinate sets like that! Guys, you do this every year. People make needlessly confident guesses about what they think is coming, folks over here hype up the hypothetical sets in their heads, some smoothbrain on Instagram or YouTube makes a post about them without clearly stating that they're not real rumors, somebody posts that back over here as 'confirmation', and everybody's set up for yet another round of disappointment when it turns out to be completely unrelated.

WIP on the Cantwell-class arrestor cruiser from Solo. Still a ways to go on the rest of the ship, but the front end is the hardest part, since this flange thing has to taper in both dimensions over a distance that doesn't correspond to any existing wedge pieces, so I wanted to make sure that was going to stay together before I built everything else around it. This is going to be the longest model I've made so far, although it won't have as many pieces as the Class 4 container transport. I'll be able to finally drop the "although this is not a 'UCS model' per se, it is UCS scale" verbiage--this is definitely a UCS model. I don't know whether you guys are interested in WIP posts or not. Most of the models I've build so far have been small enough that they didn't really make sense, but I have grander ambitions too. Thoughts? Appreciated, or just spam?

If y'all aren't careful about wishing for an AT-TE you're going to have people over on Instagram reporting your speculation as fact and then reposting it back here as an 'actual' rumor.

Nothing as fancy as antigrav; it's just a magnetic accelerator, according to the Incredible Cross-Sections book. That's tech that already exists, so it's quite reasonable that it would be cheap and efficient in SW.

There have been tons of problems with virtually all of the reference books published recently, too. Stuff that there's just no reason to be wrong about. To take a random example, the Wookieepedia page for the Encyclopedia of Starfighters and Other Vehicles from 2018 has a list of dozens of errors, and that's not even all that're in the book. I don't understand why this seems to be so hard, since like you say, they literally only have to get one single person who knows the material to read through this stuff and point out the problems. It's not like Star Wars fans are hard to find; you'd think they could hire some.

I mean, I haven't handled the set in person, so I guess it's impossible to be certain, but look at the top right corner of the one on the weapons rack, where the square corner of the sticker overlaps the rounded corner of the brick. And you can see on the bottom edge that it isn't on perfectly straight, either.

That's true for both sergeants and majors too, though, and they didn't come out in another set six months ago. The previous version of the commander was already cheaper than any other rank except the sergeant that came in the battle pack.

SPHA-T is actually short for Self-Propelled Heavy Artillery - Turbolaser. In the EU there was also a SPHA-I, which was the same chassis with an ion cannon. Next year will be the 20th anniversary of AoTC, so they might do something for that, but they generally haven't bothered with individual movie anniversaries before in the past.

Those are stickers, or at least the slopes are. You can see the corner peeling up on the one on the weapon stand.

The Hoth pack is definitely useful to go with the AT-AT and AT-ST, and I like the builds, although it seems like it would've been really easy to make the P-tower accurately sized; literally all they had to do was swap the 4x4 dish for a 6x6 one and it would be a stronger set. I have a hard time getting excited about the clones, though. I see a lot of people saying that it's an improvement over the 2018 Jedi and Clone Troopers BP, and that's true, but that was unquestionably one of the worst BPs LEGO's ever released, so clearing that bar isn't really very meaningful. The build is just an even smaller version of the same already-undersized command station from Clone Troopers vs Droidekas, and it would be largely useless even if I didn't already have the better one. I don't have any problem with making the commander available to people who don't have the Gunship, but since I do have the Gunship it doesn't do a whole lot for me, and while there's nothing wrong with shinies I would've far preferred something more interesting. I think a lot of the grievances with the set are basically that LEGO's trying to please multiple audiences and disappointing all of them instead of committing to one and making a set that would really please half the population. The army builders are annoyed because the commander and outpost are completely useless for that, so to get the shines they have to buy a lot of crap they don't want; and the figure collectors are annoyed because there's nothing new here (the shinies may be technically new prints, but you'd have to put them right next to the old ones to tell). If it was just shinies and a speeder or something (like the Hoth pack is, essentially), the army builders would be delighted and everybody else would recognize that they were the intended audience; and if it was three new figures (not even necessarily highly desirable ones, but just named clones that hadn't previously been made, or a new Star Corps trooper, or whatever) then the collectors would be happy; but as it is it isn't clear who this is really for, which leaves most people vaguely annoyed. That is accurate to to the movie, though. There's a lot of variation in the uniforms. As one would expect from a rebellion, of course.

Not a new ship this time, but I've completely redone the instruction manual for my Nebulon-B. This was the first model I ever made instructions for and I didn't really understand how Stud.io's camera rotation worked, so they were pretty rough.

I agree with your overall point that there's no reason to think P2 Rex and Cody are any more imminent now than they were before, but this line specifically isn't correct. There were three different TCW versions of Anakin available in 2011 (the parka version from the Freeco Speeder, the standard TCW version from multiple sets, and the Season 4 version with the dark arms from the Nightsister Speeder), and there were two TCW Obi-Wans available in 2013 (the standard one from Pre Vizsla's Fighter and the Season 4 version from the BARC Speeder).

P1 Rex, Cody, and a bit of some kind of command post sounds a lot like 'Rookies' from the first season of TCW. There aren't that many episodes with both Rex and Cody, so if the accessory pack is based on a specific source at all rather than a generic collection of figures, the third figure could be one of the other Rishi clones. Which might be just a shiny, of course...

I've read that the issue with the Royal Starship, at least in part, is that LEGO has deprecated the chrome coating that they used to use over quality concerns. They haven't been able to develop one that doesn't wear off the bricks through regular play, so they've stopped including chrome pieces in regular sets entirely. The only recent chrome pieces have been things like the TC-4 polybag figure that're intended more as display pieces.

I've suggested this before, but I really do think we would benefit from having a rule against criticizing a set based on what you imagine is going to be in it. If you see something you don't like, by all means say so, but save your irritation for things that have actually happened rather than speculating that parts are going to be reused.

The engineer and loadmaster have never been directly pointed out in any media that I'm aware of, but the Incredible Cross-Sections illustration (which is what the set's interior is based on) shows some people that're presumably meant to be them dressed in Imperial Army driver uniforms, so LEGO's AT-ST Pilot figures are probably the most accurate choices for them.

The grey technic connector is hollow, but the orange pin and 2l axle aren't. You can get it out with a screwdriver or knife blade, but probably not without damaging it.

The good news is that the going rate for that 4L axle is less than a cent, so if worst came to worst and you did have to damage it to get it out, it's definitely not a big deal to replace it.

There are plenty of folks here who can give you advice with Stud.io, but you may need to be a bit more specific with what you're looking for to get useful help. If you're looking for examples of building techniques, my suggestion would be to browse Rebrickable for similar builds (or for complex models in general, if you're just looking for broad ideas). If you have a specific technical problem that you don't want to make public for some reason (like, a particular part of the ship you're not sure how to design), you're welcome to PM me; I can't promise I can help you, but I have a fair bit of experience with Stud.io (check the link in my signature to get an idea of my building style), so I can at least give it a shot.

I hope it does, but I'm not at all confident of that. I expected the price of 10123 Cloud City to drop when they released 75222 and there was finally another, much cheaper way to get Bespin Lando, Luke, and Leia, but instead it's more expensive than ever; it cost $600 when 75222 came out in 2018 and it's $2500 used today. The top review on Brickset is somebody who got a deal on it in 2009 for $50.

The prices of virtually all older SW sets have doubled or tripled, at least, since the start of the pandemic. It doesn't seem sustainable to me; it seems like the bubble ought to pop at some point, but I don't know when or if that'll happen. As somebody who already owns most of the sets, in some sense it benefits me, but it's definitely bad for LEGO collecting as a hobby. Like, it's fine to say that the Finch Dallow figure is $630 because it's rare, and that's true, but it was equally rare in February 2020 and it only cost $65 then. That was well after it stopped being available, so nothing about its prevalence has changed, but its price has increased by a factor of ten in less than two years. I don't know how anybody who didn't already have almost all the older sets they want could get into collecting them at this point. Surely something has to give.

The cheapest Finch Dallow is currently $630, so that may not be the best example of an unimportant Sequel character. There's clearly enormous demand for those figures as well.

Looks like other folks have covered this pretty thoroughly already, but the R1, Solo, Rebels, etc sets weren't included in the numbers in my chart at all. I literally just used the numbers listed for each category on Bricklink without making any attempt to discern which items to count as sets, so that wouldn't include any Brickheadz or polybag models but would include some other random stuff that someone who was being more careful probably wouldn't count (some Celebration exclusive models, for example), so @PreVizsla's specific numbers are almost certainly better than mine.

I'm just going to post the same analysis that I did the last time we had this discussion (which was more than two months ago, which I think is actually a longer gap than usual). Looking just at regular system sets, BrickLink shows 181 OT, 121 Prequel, 49 Sequel, and 74 TCW. There's a little bit of fuzziness with those numbers, since they include some polybag figures and miscellaneous other stuff that probably shouldn't count for these purposes, but they're good enough to save the work of going through every set manually. LEGO has been releasing SW sets for 22 years, but only the OT and TPM have been out that long; the average Prequel movie has been getting sets for 19 years, the average ST movie for 4 years, and TCW for 13 years. That works out to 8.2 sets/year for the OT, 6.4 sets/year for the Prequels, 12.3 sets/year for the Sequels, and 5.7 sets/year for TCW. So from the raw numbers, it looks like the OT gets more coverage than the PT but not by that much, while the ST is seriously overrepresented and TCW gets the shaft. But of course that's not the whole story, since set distributions don't remain even approximately stable over time. Movies are always (obviously) disproportionately covered when they come out and then get far fewer sets in later years--for example, more than half (25/49) of all TPM sets ever are from the first three years after the movie premiered. Furthermore, the total number of sets released has increased significantly over time, from a low of 12 sets in 2001 to a high of 67 in 2018, meaning that movies that got their premier bumps earlier got fewer total sets than newer ones. As a result, the better metric is the average fraction of total sets allocated to each era during the years that that era has been out. For that, we get: OT 44%, PT 30%, ST 35%, TCW 25%. (Those numbers don't sum to 100% because TCW and the ST aren't averaged over the whole time period--if we included the 0s for the years before those eras premiered, it would add up, but that wouldn't be very useful data). That shows the OT consistently overrepresented, the ST doing a bit better than the PT, and TCW getting the shaft again. Now, the ST is still higher because it hasn't had the 'tail' yet; most of the years we're counting here are still the premier bump period, so we should expect that to even out over time as the rate of new ST sets in the next couple of years will be much lower than it was while the movies were coming out. To clarify that a bit, we should break the graph out into sections: the period from 1999-2007 when it was just OT and PT, the period from 2008-2014 when TCW was introduced, and the period from 2015-present when the ST was introduced. Conveniently, that separates the total period almost exactly into thirds. 1999-2007: OT 55%, PT 45%. More OT than PT sets, but pretty even split. Probably works out to even if you control for the fact that not all the PT movies were out the whole time, but I'm not going to try to. 2008-2014: OT 32%, PT 24%, TCW 43%. As remarked in this argument already, TCW dominated the era when there wasn't any other new content coming out. But the big news is: 2015-2021: OT 42%, PT 18%, ST 35%, TCW 6%. This is the major takeaway from this graph, in my opinion. The influx of ST sets almost entirely replaced PT and TCW sets, while the rate of OT sets remained roughly constant. That, in my opinion at least, definitely is grossly disproportionate enough to justify people getting up in arms about it. PT and TCW combined don't even make up 25% of sets for the last seven years. That may not hurt too much for people who've been collecting for decades, but for anybody who likes those eras who's just getting into LEGO or coming back after a long break, it's a pretty rough spread. Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that TCW and PT sets can often double for each other, or that there's a fair bit of overlap between OT and ST sets as well (yes, yes, they're different, but one X-wing or Falcon is much like another for many purposes). That's a matter of personal opinion for whether you'd want to count some sets as both PT and TCW or whatever, so you can shift these numbers around a bit if you like to compensate for that. But the point is that, even combined, the PT and TCW definitely are seriously underrepresented compared to other eras. And that's without even touching the PT UCS question, or any of the Rogue One, Rebels, or Solo sets that might as well be OT and aren't included in this data at all.