Kdapt-Preacher

Yes, or near enough as to make no difference. That model is only about 6% larger than 75252, so most of the smaller ships will still be within a stud of the right length, and even the ones that aren’t will be close enough that nobody’d notice the difference without personally measuring them.

That's intentional. That part of the ship is depicted differently in different sources, and it's symmetrical on a lot of them, but they're asymmetrical in the movie (supposedly; the rear shots are all kinda blurry). Here's a model that shows it clearly.

I'm still alternating structural stuff for Executor with thinking about greebling and smaller details. These are a couple more concepts for what some of its weapons might look like. I showed off the three in the back a while ago; the back left is LEGO's version of an ISD1 turret from 75252; the back center is my design for an ISD2 octuple-barrel turret; and the back right is a vague idea for a heavier turret of approximately that size. No obvious turrets are visible on the Executor studio model, so there's no direct reference other than extrapolating from what other Imperial Navy turrets tend to look like. In the front row, the smallest gun is intended to match the shapes of some of the greeblies on the edges of the hull panels on the studio model; there might be a couple hundred of those along the length of the ship. That also happens to be pretty close to the size of the main turrets on a Victory, so I may use that or a very similar design when I eventually get that ship finished. The two next to it are slightly larger than an ISD's turrets, and could possibly correspond to some of the squarish lumps scattered across Executor's surface, but more probably would be situated around the cortical regions. Finally, the big turret would be part of the super-heavy anti-capital battery that Executor supposedly has but never seems to actually use. Those barrels are each about the size of the big spinal cannons on a Munificent-class frigate. A gun of this size definitely ought to be visible on the studio model, so it's hard to say exactly where these things should go on the ship, but my tendency would be to nestle them down in the cortical regions where they'll blend in with all the random antennae and spars and stuff. From a tactical perspective it doesn't make any sense to put your guns down there, obviously, but the model is what it is; there's nowhere to hide the kind of weapons Executor is supposed to have on the surface of the ship.

This is the basic idea of what I'm looking at for Executor's hull struts. Details may still change slightly, but this is approximately what it's going to look like. I've test-built one of these spars already and it's quite a sturdy structure. The layout will be something roughly like this. In this image the spars are positioned 41 studs apart, but I think that's probably overkill given how light the hull panels are. I'll likely remove at least a couple of them, at least in places where the hull panels are overlapping three or more. The flat hull plates are divided into individual sections, currently 128 studs square, although I may lower that to 80 studs or thereabouts since I think the 128-stud ones may be a little too large to easily manage during assembly. The idea here is that the whole thing should break down into sections so it could be transported (although you'd still probably need a truck; this isn't gonna go in a car, or even probably a van). The grey struts in that image that form the base of the brim trench break down into 82-stud-long sections, and each of the diagonal spars will separate from them and fold up so they could be tossed in a box. I'm not saying it would be practical (at all), or that you could assemble this quickly (I suspect assembly would take days, and certainly require multiple people), but in theory I think it would be possible to take it to a convention or something. This whole thing is built around a series of Pythagorean triangles, so all those diagonal beams are in-click with each other and can be connected directly to the central structural elements, which will be oriented parallel with the direction of flight. Current plan is for the total build to be about six feet tall, so the bridge tower is at or just above eye level for an average adult. That puts the brim trench at about four feet off the ground, and the bottommost tip of the ventral armor about two feet off the ground. You might have to crouch down to get a good look at the hangars and stuff on the underside, but I think it would look silly if it was any higher than that (and you wouldn't be able to see the dorsal cortex without standing on something).

Specifically, they're of those three sizes. ;) Or at least the outermost nozzle parts are. The cylinder widths vary over the length of the engine, but these are good enough to let me roughly block out where they'll need to go on the model. The total lengths of the engines will end up being around 80 studs. The texture's going to change a lot since there's some greebling and whatnot on the outside of the engines as well, but this is the basic idea. I still need to think about how I'm going to do the flames in the engine--it'll be hard to make that look natural, I think. We'll have to see. That level of detail is easier to sort out once the structure's in place.

This is the exact kind of thing that gets taken out of context on Youtube or Instagram and then reposted back here as an "actual" rumor.

I am making progress on Executor. I'm still not sure I've placed any bricks that will actually end up in the final model, but I have what I think is a relatively solid plan for how everything is going to go together. The more I work on it the more reasonable everything seems, which does kind of worry me a little bit, but I think it'll work out. Most of what I've been doing still isn't very visual, but here's my back-of-the-napkin sketch for what the engine cylinders might look like, to give a sense of the scale. I had kind of been picturing these as giant contraptions that would need a ton of internal framing (I've been working on a Lucrehulk-class core ship recently and had that sort of UCS Death Star-sized thing in my head), but they're really not ridiculously large at all. I think 16 segments is enough, here; I'd want to bump up to 32 to get a smoother circle if they were any larger, but at this scale that wouldn't buy me much, and doing them with simple hinge plates like this is far sturdier.

I already have a tentative model for Echo's transport, but I'm hoping to get a clearer view of it in this week's episode. I think I can extrapolate the scale pretty well from comparing it to the Gozanti last week, but I'd like to see a good profile view of it. If we don't get that I'll go ahead with the model I've got, though. Gorain Shard's ship looks great, but we need a lot more information than just the brief glimpse we got--hopefully that turns up again and we can figure out how big it's supposed to be. #202, the Hardcell-class interstellar transport! A briefly featured but memorable ship from Attack of the Clones. They never showed up in TCW, so they haven't attracted much attention in more recent media, but they're featured in a number of video games (albeit mostly as stationary targets). This model also includes a stand so you can display the ship in horizontal 'flight' mode, but if you prefer to display it in the vertical landing posture its legs will support it fine without needing a separate stand.

They're still using it for TPM-era Obi-Wan, too, although granted the last one of those was in 2017. It still showed up in a couple new minifigs last year, though, so I think it's too soon to say it's completely done for.

A simple one here: #201, Dr. Aphra's Ark Angel! There isn't much information available about this ship, including its official size, so the scaling here is an estimate (but I'd like to think it's a reasonably good estimate). I also just posted a small update to the existing Imperialis model, an internal change to make it easier to build.

The long-awaited (or at least long-promised!) update to the Quasar Fire has arrived! That took like six months longer than I expected; I finished the structural bits ages ago, but then got an actual job and didn't do the instructions for a while. The main change here is reversing the orientation of the hangar floor such that it presents a smooth outer surface over the entire model, with no exposed antistuds. This is what I always wanted the ship to look like, but this was the first large model I ever designed and I didn't have the technical skill to pull it off at the time. This change makes the stand a little bit more awkward, but the ship itself is both sturdier and easier to build than it was before. The one downside is that the interior of the hangar is now slightly less smooth, and it's no longer easy to connect the optional interior decor (which I've removed, as a result; the parts list is now to build regular TIE racks in all four hangars); but I think that's a minor concern given that the interior of the hangars are hardly visible while the model's assembled anyway, and the 'play value' from the interior furniture was pretty marginal to begin with. However, I have left the original instructions and Stud.io files available on Bricksafe for anyone who had their heart set on seeing the floor gantries. This is now v6 of this model, for anyone counting! https://rebrickable.com/mocs/MOC-68031/Kdapt-Preacher/11455-quasar-fire-class-cruiser-carrier/

I know perfectly well that this isn't what you're looking for, but it is, literally speaking, "UCS style"...

It's a reference book, so it could be shifted forwards a little bit, but there are constraints that mean it couldn't be moved forwards that much. He has to have died before Satine took the throne (since she inheirited it from him), and she was already the Duchess at the time of her early relationship with Obi-Wan, which was before The Phantom Menace. It's not clear exactly how long before, but at least several years; in Legends it was around 8 years before, and although I'm not sure whether that number made it to the current canon, it has to have been at least 5 or so. That means he died a minimum of maybe 45 years before the events of Mando, so Bo-Katan would have to be at least in her early fifties; and pushing his death back to 50-ish years before Mando and Bo-Katan into her late fifties fits better with other sources even without the one that explicitly says it was 51 years before. The easier way to get to that conclusion is to look at what Bo-Katan was doing in TCW, though. That was 30 years before Mando and she was already an experienced soldier and the second-in-command of a major militia group, which makes it pretty hard to believe that she'd have been younger than 25. There's some wiggle room in all these numbers, of course, but the balance of evidence is definitely that she's 30-ish in TCW and 60-ish in Mando. That doesn't mean to say that they won't retcon it, of course, since Dave Filoni doesn't exactly have a stellar track record of respecting existing canon, but he's typically stuck to what was established in his own shows at least.

I'm not sure what you mean by that. They're around in the background occasionally (there are some in the Bad Batch arc in S7, for example), but they're not at all common, certainly not like the plain P1s were in the earlier seasons. Do you have an example in mind of an episode that featured them more prominently?

Because until Bad Batch they effectively didn't exist. They were pictured in promotional materials for RotS but there are none in the actual movie (at least probably not--there are a few clones in the far background in a few shots that might be plain, and the ball turret gunners in the gunship that drops off Yoda on Coruscant have markings in some shots and seem to lose them in others--but there are certainly none in focus). There are a very, very few scattered in the background of the later seasons of TCW, but again, not enough to have ever been a meaningful presence anywhere, and it's not clear who they're supposed to be in-universe, since there's never been a unit that was described as not having markings by the time the P2 armor was adopted; they only show up when the showrunners need to fill out a crowd shot in a context where they don't want to use any specific legion. The Imperial ones in Bad Batch are the first time they've ever appeared on screen for longer than a couple of frames.

Why is that Executor still so thin, though? It's proportioned completely wrong. They've done the exact same thing they did with the UCS model and built it with the 6x2 wedge pieces. The actual ship has a slope of about 1:4.2, almost 50% wider than the model depicts it; it would be much closer to the proper shape if it was built with the 4x2 wedge plates. I'm delighted to see more display-style ship models, but it frustrates me to no end that LEGO can't seem to get this particular ship right.

That's technically not true: Rex was shown in close proximity to ISPs during the Battle of Queel in The Clone Wars: Crash Course in 2008. He's never actually shown in the same frame as one in the comic, but it's implied that he rode in one. I don't have any opinion on the contents of the set, but that wouldn't be the weirdest source LEGO's ever pulled from.

Nothing that's happened in this thread has been worth 270 posts in the last twelve hours.

The 'UCS' Porg was another recent one where the first indication that it was happening was a photo of it already in a store somewhere. Security seems to be better for those than for the normal System sets.

Hmm, maybe--I thought the initial report had been that all of that batch of stuff was supposedly for next year, but I had missed the post that said Promobricks claimed it for this year, so I could be wrong about that. No, the question was about the Sail Barge rumor. There was no mention of other UCS sets. I'm not sure what you're getting at here.

Neither--if it's coming at all, it's more likely 2024 than this year.

I'm a bit unsure what you guys are talking about with it being too small, as the leaked images seem pretty close to minifig-scale to me. The part that's visible in that picture looks to be around 70 or 75 studs long, and you can't see the curved back section, which would add maybe another 5 studs to the total length. That puts gives it a scale of 1:46 or thereabouts, so within 10% of "proper" minifig scale (to the degree that such a thing exists). I think y'all are maybe picturing the Sail Barge as a bigger vehicle than it really is--it's shorter than the Falcon and much narrower, with probably less than half of the overall mass. This model may be scaled slightly smaller than the Falcon is, but not by enough that I think you'd be likely to notice without actually measuring it and doing the math. On a completely unrelated note, what's up with the mini Arquitens model in this month's LSW Magazine pack? The bridge is in completely the wrong place on the ship, all the way back on the engine section instead of on the main hull. There's no structural reason why they couldn't move it forwards a couple of studs, so I don't know why they've gotten that that wrong.

My understanding is that there are some sets out there that have the Finch minifig with the original box art, but there definitely are boxes with Finch on them as well. https://cdn.rebrickable.com/media/thumbs/sets/75188-2/56973.jpg/1000x800p.jpg?1666375000.6492016

That kind of thing does happen occasionally. Copies of 10188 produced after 2010 used the new Han face print, for example. But it's not very common and mostly only happens with sets that're in production for an unusually long time and have had multiple production runs. It hasn't been long enough for 2021/22 sets to have been updated like that yet. The Finch Dallow thing was a different situation, I think, since that was an entirely different minifigure rather than just a slightly different print. That's the only time they've ever updated the box art to reflect such a change, as far as I know--in all other cases the change was because LEGO internally considered the parts interchangable.

Remember how much inflation we've had in the last couple of years, though. Prices have risen across the board and this community hasn't really updated what it considers an appropriate PPP ratio in the entire time I've been here (and probably for longer than that, honestly). If we compare to 2010 dollars, today's $35 becomes $25.70, which is right in the ballpark for 253 pieces, and $160 becomes $117.60, which is in the right range for 1067 pieces. We would've considered these reasonable a couple of years ago; they look worse because the numbers have gotten bigger, but the inflation-adjusted value per piece has stayed basically constant for decades.