Kdapt-Preacher

#131, the Imperial Customs Corvette! Despite the concerns of the people messaging me on Rebrickable, I am neither dead nor done making ships. Another old Expanded Universe ship that doesn't get much love these days, this Imperial Customs Corvette has 132 pieces and is about 16 studs long. This ship is built along similar lines to the Raider-class corvette, with the thin sloped hull, so I've used the same ball joint method to attach the wings, and I'm quite pleased with the result.

We need a moratorium on assertions about sales data that aren’t backed up by explicit sources. I wholeheartedly approve of these kinds of arguments, but if we’re gonna do it y’all need to be breaking out the actual stats rather than just declaring that things are underproduced.

They're pretty hard to spot. There's an even subtler one in TCW, too, my favorite unit to trip people up with: the clone garrison on Orto Plutonia has markings that're just a slightly lighter white than the rest of their armor. I assume they mean my post from 19 September here.

As much new Star Wars content as we may be getting, it's nothing compared to how fast Marvel stuff has been coming out. This is a particularly extreme case, but in the 365-day period between 9 July 2021 and 8 July 2022, there are going to be SEVEN Marvel movies and all or part of at least three and possibly as many as seven new shows (depending on when in 2022 Ms. Marvel, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, and Secret Invasion are released). Of course that's because the stuff that was supposed to be released in 2020 got pushed forwards, and they don't usually keep up that kind of schedule, but they've had either two or three movies every year since 2012, plus the shows and whatnot. There just isn't time to have many sets based on anything except new content. Plus, there are way fewer Marvel sets than Star Wars sets overall--they only do around 20 sets per year, while Star Wars gets about twice that. EDIT: And, despite all that, there was actually a set based on Iron Man 1 released this year--76190 Iron Monger Mayhem. What can you do.

If we're talking about the same scene, all the clones I can see on the ground there are 41st Elite Corps (the light grey markings just aren't very obvious in that lighting). The ones in the gunship behind Mace and Obi-Wan are an interesting case, because at the beginning of that scene (40:22 on the Disney+ version, for example) they seem to be plain, at least over the parts between their shoulders and knees; but by the time the gunship lands they're also 41st Elite. You can see the grey shoulders and belt at 41:06, although granted only for a moment. It's easier to spot that the turret gunner visible behind Yoda when the gunship's in flight definitely has white shoulders, while the one visible in the landing sequence is clearly 41st (assuming they're intended to be the same, of course--the gunners aren't a continuity error because they might just be different and we happen to only see one at a time, but I think it's more likely that the entire crew changes color between the flight and landing sequences). Regardless, plain troopers definitely do show up occasionally in TCW, so they're certainly an appropriate figure to make despite not featuring much in the movie. My only point there was that it's been just as long since they made shocktroopers, 212th, Wolfpack, 91st Recon, and so on, not to speak of the Star or Nova Corps, so I don't think it makes a lot of sense to be grousing about LEGO not being able to tell them from stormtroopers when they're receiving equal treatment as much more prominent variants. On a related note, wow, there sure were a lot of new clones released in 2014. That was quite the year for the GAR.

You know, this comes up a lot, but I don't think it's justified. Plain white P2 troopers seem to have been virtually nonexistent under the Republic. They were pictured in promotional material around Revenge of the Sith, but if they're actually in the movie anywhere it's only for a fraction of a second (the gunner on the Guarlara might be, but you can only see the back of his head; or maybe some blurry figures in the background in the Jedi Temple hangar, although the other troopers there are 212th). There are a handful in TCW, but they don't come up remotely as often as plain P1 troopers did--there are some in the background on Anaxes, for example, and the armor Fives stole when he was a fugitive on Coruscant was plain, but overall they make up only a tiny fraction of all the troopers we see. If anything, LEGO has released more figures of them than their prominence in-universe calls for, relative to troops from virtually any specific unit. The Bad Batch is the first time they've shown up on-screen in any prominent role, so it will make much more sense to have them in the TBB sets that will presumably show up at some point than it does to put them in random RotS or TCW sets.

It's interesting to see that other than the 4+ X-wing back in January, there's been no suggestion of any Sequel Trilogy sets this year at all. Like the lack of Sequel content in the lineup of Disney+ shows announced last year, I have to think that that's a statement on Disney and LEGO's assessment of people's level of interest in the Sequel era generally.

I strongly encourage everyone to avoid getting their hopes up about either the 187th or the 212th. These rumors are not backed by any reliable source.

I would be overjoyed if LEGO made the 187th Legion, but that doesn't seem very plausible to me. The 187th isn't just not canon, it's never appeared anywhere in Star Wars; it was created by Hasbro for a figure pack in 2006 and has never been used by anyone but them. More importantly, the Bad Batch arc in Season 7 of TCW showed Mace leading a currently unnamed unit, which has presumably replaced the 187th in current canon. If the rumor is correct at all, it's much more likely that the clones would be the ones from TCW. The color is similar enough to the 187th that somebody could have misidentified them. They do it because people like me want them. They've already made figures of the 91st Recon Corps; surely something new is better than a repeat? That said, the Geonosis troopers are a bad example of anything because LEGO pulled them out of thin air, so you're right that nobody was asking for those.

The other guy is suggesting that it's a corporate-directed intentional PR move, not a rogue employee, so the idea that the individual spokesperson would get in trouble for it doesn't hold up. Again, you're right that that's not a realistic scenario, but they could do it. They aren't, but they could.

What law are you trying to cite there? It's illegal to fraudulently misrepresent the contents of a contract in an attempt to convince someone to sign it, but anybody can say anything they like about it to the general public, at least in the US. You're correct that the idea that they're intentionally lying to excuse not making a CMF series is completely nonsense, of course, but it's nonsense because it doesn't make any sense for them to do it, not because it would be illegal for them to.

Y’all might be being a little bit hard on these sets given that we have absolutely no idea what is or isn’t in any of them, LMAO.

Nobody thinks that LEGO's market research is 100% correct, but since nobody can think of any obvious logical reason for LEGO to release the same vehicles over and over when ones that are seemingly just as good get ignored, it seems like they must have something telling them to make some sets over others. The A-wing and the TIE interceptor are roughly equally prominent in RotJ, and they're similarly sized, so on the face of it one might expect them to receive similar coverage, but there have been seven A-wings released in the time since the last TIE interceptor in 2006. That's enough discrepancy that it's hard to believe that it's a produce of anything other than an intentional choice, and since nobody outside of LEGO gets any insight into why they might make such a choice, the best they can do is try to speculate about the data LEGO might be looking at that would produce such a skewed result. It's ultimately always pointless since we have absolutely zero ability to determine whether any given speculation is accurate, of course, but if people only talked about things that can be proven the world would be a less interesting place. On a completely unrelated note, pictures of the next SW LEGO magazine foil pack are up on Rebrickable, and am I crazy, or is the Turbo Tank assembled backwards? I know they've got cockpits on both ends, so it doesn't really have a 'backwards' per se, but they've got the conning tower on the narrow end rather than the end with most of the guns.

The difference between these specific numbers and mine is that I just used the number listed for each movie on BrickLink, which includes some foil packs, co-packs, reissues with new numbers, and so forth that shouldn't really be counted as sets, so your numbers are better than mine (for anybody else referencing this). But the basic idea that the OT gets a lot more sets is going to hold up no matter how you slice it.

Correct. And neither do the Rebel and Imperial battle packs that are technically based on SW:Battlefront, or the TIE fighter sets with Legends vehicles, or Darth Vader’s Castle, and so forth. Only the ones that are specifically for the three OT movies.

Oh, I can see how my post might have been unclear. All these numbers are only looking at sets for the nine numbered films and TCW. RO, Solo, Rebels, Mando, and the various smaller sub-themes aren't included in this data at all. If you included the other OT-era subthemes in the OT count it would be another 67 sets since 2014, skewing the distribution even further in that direction. In fairness, if you did that you should also count Yoda Chronicles, Bad Batch, and a couple other miscellaneous sets towards TCW, adding 10 to that count as well, but that doesn't remotely make up the difference.

Instead of spending pages arguing opinions about this, why don't we argue about the actual numbers? 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.

It's very weird that we know the minifigs from the May the 4th set more than six months in advance, but we still don't know anything about the AT-AT that's supposedly coming out in, like, six weeks. Anybody have any idea what's up with that? I know Promobricks is reliable, but where could they be getting such an odd selection of info from?

I wouldn't complain about an RotJ one, per se, but I'm certainly happier to hear that it's the ESB version. The RotJ version has already appeared in four regular sets and a UCS (counting the Rogue One set, since that's identical to the RotJ model). Sure, the ESB version isn't as famous, but it's better to have the variety given that there's no shortage of the RotJ one. They're similar enough that people who don't already know won't notice or care, and the people who do know the difference will, I expect, generally be glad they got it right. No, the AT-ST was always in the movie. You may be thinking of the Sentinel-class landing crafts that were added to Tatooine in the Special Edition of ANH.

I don't think it was even a fake rumor, really. Just people speculating that it might be that since there aren't many other candidates that could justify a piece count that high. I'm sure some people interpreted that as a rumor, since there seems to be a crowd out there that takes every word that gets said on these forums as prophecy, but I don't remember seeing anybody here who thought that was meant to be anything concrete.

I don't think that's necessarily an accurate take. There have been three major game releases since Disney took over, and two of the three have gotten sets; Fallen Order is the only one that hasn't (you could count Squadrons as a fourth game, but that was much lower-profile than FO or the Battlefronts). Unlike the other games, KotOR is a very well-established property that LEGO has made stuff for in the past (Revan figure, and the three SWTOR sets). It's way too soon for anyone to have any actual idea of whether there'll be KotOR sets or not, and probably more than anything else it depends on how much of a marketing push Disney decides to do around the game, but it's certainly not out of the question.

In the case of the X-wing, my understanding is that they recalled unsold inventory from stores rather than asking individual consumers to send them back. 'Recall' may be the wrong term for that, but I don't know a better one. Whatever you call it, the set was hard to find for a while before the corrected version became widely available. Other Star Wars sets had changed mid-production (6211, for example, got a fairly significant redesign to increase its structural soundness back in 2006 or thereabouts), but not for things like faulty parts.

The hinge-clip-things on the back of the cockpit canopy were molded at an upwards angle, so the cockpits wouldn't stay closed. They had a couple of studs at the front that they were supposed to click into, but the hinges wouldn't rotate that far down, and if you forced it shut it had enough force to pop open again. A relatively minor problem in the grand scheme of things, but LEGO recalled the set and issued new canopies to people who had them. EDIT: Ah, Fuppylodders beat me to it. But you get the idea!

I do think it's the case that since 2015 (I say that specifically because it started with the first TFA wave), there have been more random errors with sets than there were before that. The quality of the sets themselves has still mostly been great, but stuff like sets being based on concept art that changed dramatically before the movies came out is a problem that they don't seem to have had before, and production problems like the cockpit mold issue that led to the recall of the first issue of Poe's X-wing were previously completely unheard of--I don't know of a single example of LEGO having to recall a set before 2015. And it has been notable that there've been a lot more minor mistakes in instruction manuals recently than there used to be; that's always happened occasionally, but for the last couple of years almost every wave has had a manual that had a piece misplaced in a couple of steps or something like that. My completely uninformed guess is that Disney's been giving LEGO less lead time than Lucasfilm used to and that errors are slipping in for reasons that LEGO isn't entirely to blame for (and the design team certainly isn't), but whatever the cause, it's hard to avoid a sense that quality control has slipped a bit from where it was eight or ten years ago. The reaction to the design video is certainly overblown, but at the same time, you have to admit that from a PR perspective that was a really, really stupid comment. It may very well be true that most people don't care about the difference between a pilot and a commander (in fact, for LEGO's core kid audience, it almost certainly is true), but you shouldn't have to be a public relations genius to recognize that it isn't a helpful response to the people who're asking you about it specifically because they care and are annoyed that you don't seem to.

I'm not sure which games you're talking about, but in the Complete Saga it certainly is.