Kdapt-Preacher

That's the rumor, yes. The full discussion was on page 42 of this thread. Nothing very concrete, though.

Do you have any information supporting that? Because unless you've seen something specific, I don't believe this for a second. A 4000-piece Venator would be well over twice the size of the next largest Prequel trilogy set that's ever been made (the Republic Dropship and AT-OT) and only the third ever Prequel UCS set (after Obi-Wan's starfighter and General Grievous, unless you count the midi-scale Naboo fighter). There's a good chance of a remade ISD, but at the moment a Venator is a fairytale.

Cloud City had been 'rumored' for years, though. This year it was finally right, but I wouldn't put too much stock in the timing of when people started talking about it again.

The AT-APs appeared on Felucia and Saleucami in Revenge of the Sith, too, for almost as long as they were shown on Kashyyyk. The Felucia variant would've been a great excuse for Commander Bly and the Star Corps, since Bly's never appeared as a minifig and the Star Corps troopers haven't since 2007. A huge missed opportunity all around.

We're way overdue for a new snowspeeder (1999, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2013, 2014) and it's getting to be about time for a Naboo starfighter (1999, 2007, 2011, 2015), but I think one TIE Interceptor and TIE Bomber are plenty for two decades, don't you?

I honestly think it looks worse--the biggest structural improvement the 2014 walker had over the 2008 version was the addition of the extra angled portion on top of the pod, replacing the simple sloped bricks with a plate connected with a hinge to get the slightly more complex shape, and the 2019 version doesn't seem to have that.

The picture is blurry as hell, but I do think it looks like three different guard helmets. I'm optimistic. There are three guards, at least.

It almost has to be a cloud car. The bricks that are pictured there are mostly orange. But it clearly has a large missile launcher or something on the side, too, which the cloud car notably lacks; if it is a CC microfighter, it's going to be a really ugly one.

Nah, you just happened to be the last post before MKJoshA showed up. Don't think too much of it. The fleet troopers don't need printed legs, per se, but it does look a bit weird to me to have a really detailed torso and then plain pants, particularly since most of the figures they're going to be around (TKs especially) have leg printing these days. When everybody had plain legs it was fine, but it would be nice of them to include the cargo pockets and have a consistent level of detail everywhere. To do it properly, though, the pockets ought to be on the sides of their legs, and that isn't common for anybody yet. The previous Tantive IV was released for the 10th anniversary of the Star Wars line--it would certainly be fitting if they made an updated one for the 20th, but at the same time, I'd hate to set a precedent of having the same anniversary sets every time.

It's as close to the RotJ bikers as the actual scout trooper helmet LEGO's currently using, which they also used for clone scouts in the past. See also: they use the same helmet for shoretroopers and the Imperial hovertank pilots, which are about as different as the scout trooper helmets, and the standard P1 clone helmet for P1 pilots, when the P1 pilot helmet is completely different other than the face. It'd be nice if they made a separate mold for the Imperial scouts, sure, but I think it's unrealistically optimistic to expect them to, and kinda silly to say that it wouldn't "go over well"; they just aren't, and have never been, quite that precise with those kinds of details, and for the most part I don't think most people expect them to be. The clone scout helmets are close enough that I'll be really surprised if they make a new scout mold in the next couple of years.

No, they just made a new mold for the scout trooper helmet in 2014. It's only been used for clone scouts so far because they haven't released any sets with Imperial scout troopers since 2013, but I'm certain they'll use the same piece whenever we get another Imperial biker.

It is not. Odd Ball's helmet has a prominent insignia on the right side and no giant red and yellow stripe. A different pilot who was on-screen for nine frames in RotS has the red outline, but not the yellow stripe in the middle. Images of clones with that paint scheme show up on Google with the name Odd Ball attached, but I don't know where they originate from; maybe that was intended to be him at one point but his design was changed before the movie was released? I think it's more likely that the minifigure is based on this clone, who would have appeared in one of the unfinished episodes of TCW. That episode would have been in production when the microfighter was released, so if LEGO asked for reference images of a clone pilot as they were going to be depicted on the show, that's what they'd have gotten. Come to think of it, that could be what's up with the AT-AP, too. They never appeared on TCW before, but it would make sense for the upcoming half-season of TCW to make an effort to incorporate stuff from RotS to smooth out that transition, by phasing out the V-19s and other early-war designs and replacing them with more ARC-170s and such; I don't particularly expect them to revisit Kashyyyk, so it might not explain this specific scene, but AT-APs are probably more likely to appear on-screen in the next couple of months than they have been since RotS was released.

Odd Ball's name is also said on-screen in Revenge of the Sith, and we don't have a figure of him, either.... They handled all of that super weirdly. They made shock troopers, Star Corps troopers, the AT-RT driver, clone pilots, Kashyyyk scouts, and 442nd Siege Bat troopers in the first wave after RotS, none of which had more than a couple of seconds of screen time (if that--the 442nd was cut from the movie entirely!), but didn't release the 212th and 501st troopers at all until 2013 when TCW absolutely forced them to (and they still haven't made a movie-style 501st). I do like the AT-AP. I'm a sucker for all the GAR ground vehicles, so I'm never going to complain about getting one. It's a weird choice to repeat it, especially with such similar figures, but I'd rather we have a third AT-AP than a seventh snowspeeder or fifth Naboo starfighter, and those AAT driver droids are really nice; that's the most printing they've ever put on a battle droid head. I'm also curious to see the other clone. I don't think anybody's confirmed that it will be another one of the full-camo troopers from the Kashyyyk battlepack, have they? It could just as easily be an update of the Siege Battalion Troopers from 7260 Wookiee Catamaran. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have those figures in the AT-AP set, but then it didn't make any sense to have them in the Wookiee catamaran, either. One can hope.

I like the castle, but I'm really curious why they based the set on an obscure VR experience rather than the scene from Rogue One. I approve of it--a Krennic figure would have fit, but he's been made well enough, so I'd rather have the new tank driver--but what's the logic behind that from LEGO's perspective? This is the most recent of several sets recently that have come way out of left field, at least in terms of source material. 75204 Sandspeeder is based on concept art for a cancelled Kenner toy from 1986, for god's sake. The Republic fighter tank (75182) hasn't appeared anywhere in Star Wars since the previous LEGO version was released in 2009, and Grievous's combat speeder (75199) only appeared briefly in a single episode of TCW in 2012. The Azure Angel set has been a while ago now (2015), but that was another completely unexpected one. I'm not complaining about any of these sets, but I find them baffling. I can't imagine how LEGO makes the decisions that lead to them. What fraction of their customers would even recognize any of those vehicles? The population of folks dedicated enough to have tracked down the 2002 Clone Wars microseries or have heard of the VR thing is probably an audience LEGO wants to cultivate, but it has to be a fraction of a percent of the people who buy sets.

Do we have any particular reason to trust the minifigure lists? The sets seem reasonable, but the minifigs look awfully wishlist-y, and if those lists have been confirmed by anybody reliable I at least missed it.

We don't know anything. Even the V-19 hasn't been confirmed, as far as I know. There were unsubstantiated sketchy rumors about multiple more CW sets a while ago, but that's hardly unusual and doesn't mean much.

Cloud City is supposed to be 16.2 km across, according to Wookieepedia. Minifig scale is about 1/48, and nanofigs are about 1/4 of that size, so say the scale would be 1/192. That means the disc would be 85 meters across. That isn't a house, or even a mansion; you would have to build this thing in a decently-sized airplane hangar. And that's ignoring the vane on the bottom, which would make the structure as a whole at least as tall as it is wide. I remain hopeful of someday seeing a truly minifig-scale Imperial Star Destroyer, which would (barely) fit in a basketball court. That said, what I think people here mean is 'system-scale', which is what almost all LEGO sets are--not necessarily true minifig scale (almost all vehicle sets are undersized, many of them significantly), but designed for minifigures to interact with them. For example, a truly minifig-scale Turbo Tank would be a bit more than a meter long, while the recent set is about a sixth of that, but it has hatches, chairs, controls, etc that are designed for minifigs. The UCS Millennium Falcons are rare examples of large sets that are true minifigure scale, while the Hogwarts Castle is something more like nano-System scale, in that it isn't necessarily to scale with the nanofigures (it could be? I don't know how big the 'actual' castle is, but it looks small), but it's designed for the nanofigures to interact with it. The question is whether Cloud City will be more like that or more like the system-scale UCS Death Stars (the UCS DSII display model is about 1/400,000, if anyone's curious).

Oh, yeah, that'd make more sense. The ISD is definitely at the top of the list of ones that they could remake, since it has indeed been ages and the old one is definitely less detailed than recent UCS sets have been. I'd still way rather seem them make something like one of the CIS capital ships, though. There are so many ships that have never been acknowledged by LEGO in any way--about as much time in Revenge of the Sith is spent aboard Invisible Hand as aboard the Death Star in A New Hope, but Invisible Hand has never even gotten a mini model, much less an actual set...

I don't agree--it's too soon for another UCS SSD. The last one was just in 2011; that would be the fastest duplicate UCS set we've ever had, even counting 75159 Death Star, which was just a minor update to 10188. I'm OK with remakes of some of the really old UCS sets, especially since the recent ones have been so nice by comparison (the new Sandcrawler, Falcon, X-wing, etc are all beautiful, and the old ones look dated by comparison), but the UCS Executor still looks like a recent set. It doesn't make any sense to make another one now when there are so many vehicles (the entire prequel and sequel trilogies) that haven't even been touched. It would be a waste of a UCS slot.

The new helmets are a lot bigger than the old ones, but I don't think they're inconsistent with the other recent Star Wars helmets, particularly the TIE pilots. They're all huge. And in this case, the actual helmets in the movie are also somewhat comical--look how huge it is compared to Wedge Antilles's head. I'm reserving final judgement until I have the figure in hand, but my initial reaction is that they look pretty good. I totally understand the concerns with previous figures not getting updated to the new standard, but I think it's a terrible idea to let that stand in the way of making newer, nicer figures. They still haven't updated all the pilots to flesh heads instead of yellow, but it would be silly to suggest at this point that changing to a more accurate standard was a bad idea in 2005; our pilot collections will eventually recover from this and be better for it.

There may be some inconsistency in the source material, too. In some pictures there are some helmets with ridges that clearly run all the way down the face and others with ridges that stop halfway down, but this image clearly shows only three helmets, with the "electro-bisento" and "Bilari electro-chain whip" guys wearing the same one. It may be the case that there are supposed to be four different ones, but they're so similar that not all the artists/merchandisers got that message.

As best as I can tell, there are four different helmets, but two of them are so similar I'm not sure LEGO would really be able to distinguish them. The pair with halberds have ridges running all the way down their faceplates, as pictured above, while the ones with the chain things only have ridges going about halfway down (although pictures are somewhat inconsistent). I haven't found pictures good enough to tell whether the shapes of the helmets are the same otherwise, but they're at least very close. As much as I love accurate details in my minifigs, in this case I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense for LEGO to make a new mold to accommodate that distinction.

It appeared in TCW a number of times, but its first appearance was deploying AT-TEs during the Battle of Geonosis in Attack of the Clones. That said, the one depicted in the set is in the TCW style, and it comes with animated-style clone troopers (although I wonder whether it would've come with movie-style ones if they'd had the newer style helmet mold in 2009; they couldn't really get by using the one from 2002).

The age of the movies is definitely a factor. Obviously a lot of people don't like the prequels, but the impression I've gotten from talking to a lot of people about this is that people who saw them when they were kids (specifically when they were young enough not to be repulsed by Jar Jar) have much more positive opinions of them than people who remember before it was called the Original Trilogy. The number of people who can afford UCS sets and aren't viscerally disgusted by The Phantom Menace increases every day. Your mileage may vary, of course. I was specifically hedging there by saying 'vehicles' rather than sets. I'm not sure I really count the Naboo starfighter, either, though--I understand that it's officially a UCS set, but I have a hard time applying that label to something that's smaller than the standard system-scale version. We also both forgot the Republic Dropship and AT-OT Walker, likely because it's system-scale, but that's formally a UCS set, too. Ultimately, I'm not certain to what extent it actually boils down to popularity. That would make perfect logical sense, but I sure can't see that pattern in LEGO's releases. The first one they released (well, tied for first) was a TIE Interceptor, but the much more iconic TIE/ln had to wait fifteen years? The TIE Interceptor apparently isn't even popular enough to warrant release as a regular set this decade. And what about the Republic Dropship and AT-OT Walker? The AT-OT isn't just not iconic; it has zero appearances anywhere in Star Wars except for ten seconds in the background in RotS. Even fairly serious fans could be forgiven for never having heard of it. The dropship's appeared in a few other places, but it wasn't exactly the star of the show, either. And those vehicles aren't even associated with each other--presumably those dropships deploy AT-OTs like that, but they've never been shown doing so with anything other than AT-TEs. I have no idea why that set exists, and I'm not convinced that we can really guess at LEGO's motives in any very useful way.

Even if you and some others prefer exclusively OT sets, surely limiting the largest and most impressive models to an aging and ever-diminishing subset of the IP can only be detrimental to the brand. The generation that remembers the release of the OT is approaching retirement age, and while they're still going to be wealthier and disproportionate consumers of expensive display sets, the equivalent demographic for the PT is 30 and rapidly moving into that market. I love UCS sets, and I wouldn't mind any of the ones you suggest, but I don't think it makes any sense at all to make a UCS set of something as comparatively obscure as a TIE Bomber when they've made exactly two vehicles from all the other six movies combined. I'd much rather have a Venator, or Supremacy, or a Vulture droid. Plus, obviously, let's get some normal sets of some of these things before we start talking about UCS ones! No TIE Bomber at all, one TIE Interceptor in 2006, no Nebulon, and a really crappy excuse for Home One (I liked the set fine, but you can't really say it was representative of the ship).