Kdapt-Preacher

It's just Kdapt-Preacher (#8345). I don't use Discord routinely, though, so I don't know how useful that is to you. If somebody sends me a PM here I'll usually see it the same day, but I might go months without opening Discord. Don't hold your breath for Executor. I'm working on it, but I'm still in the phase where I'm mostly doing math rather than actually building anything.

This is one where the proportions don't line up terribly well with studs. They ought to be about 1.5 studs wide, but I don't know of any sensible way to make that happen given the size constraints here. I could use jumper plates to make them 2 studs wide, but then they'd be literally square, which looks wronger than this, IMO. I dunno--I don't have any particularly strong investment in these models; they exist more because somebody on Discord asked for them than because of any real use for them, honestly. I went back and forth on whether they were worth actually posting, and obviously ultimately I did it, but I would call them a borderline case, LMAO. In unrelated news, I'm not saying it would be a good idea to brutally cannibalize my Vindicator model to turn it into a Gladiator-class, but were somebody to do something like that, a WIP image of it would look approximately like this...

#173-176, Sheathipede-class transport shuttles! Is this a clever design for a ship that's scraping the lower limit of what can be depicted at this scale, or a pathetic attempt to inflate my model count with something that can barely be considered a MOC? You decide! The Sheathipede-class transport shuttle, also known as the Neimoidian escort shuttle, Separatist shuttle, and so forth, was a small personnel transport used by the Trade Federation and CIS. This pack includes both the Trade Federation tan and CIS blue and grey color schemes, plus the enlarged Type B variant used during the Clone Wars and the Phantom II, which was a modified version used by the Spectres during the opening stages of the Galactic Civil War. Today I also posted structural updates to both the Vindicator-class and the Immobilizer 418, based on suggestions from Vincent Marin. The changes aren't visible from the outside, but the upper hull panels are now less fragile, which should make them easier to build.

I don't think that tracks. Even if LEGO didn't know before it 'happened', Season 2 finished filming more than two years ago. The development cycle for these sets is long but not that long, and certainly not long enough that two years ago they had already invested so much effort that they weren't willing to cut it.

I don't think I have any way to do that other than by purchasing it myself and leaving a review on AliExpress or something, which I'm definitely not going to do. Obviously I expect people will have a better time building the model with actual LEGOs than they would with whatever you get from this random Chinese company, but as long as they know what they're getting into... I do oppose these companies generally, of course, both because they dilute the LEGO brand and also because they routinely do steal MOCs from people who're actually selling them and directly funnel money away from independent creators. But in this specific case I don't mind it.

I have finally truly made it as a MOC designer: somebody in China is selling illegal knockoff kits of one of my models. I'm not going to link to it, because Eurobricks obviously doesn't support imitator brands (especially illegal ones), but I'm genuinely thrilled about this development. Since I'm distributing the instructions for free anyway it's no skin off my nose if somebody else wants to sell them as sets, so more power to them as far as I'm concerned, especially since they did actually credit me as the designer (although obviously it would have been courteous of them to notify me!). Fun times!

It looks strong, but it's hard to get a sense from the screenshots. If you send me the Stud.io file I'll poke around with it.

Speak for yourself! ;) It's approximately 86cm wide when the wings are horizontal.

It is obscure, for sure--Cad Bane featured prominently in TCW, but the Justifier was new in Bad Batch, so it's only ever actually appeared in one episode so far. It's not the most obscure thing they've made from those shows (that's still the Wookiee gunship, which got not one but two sets out of less than five seconds of screen time in Rebels), but it's up there, and I do think it's fair to say that basically nobody today has any particular attachment to it (or even would recognize it out of context, probably). That's why I think that besides a general feeling that this is a good time to have a Cad Bane figure available, they're probably counting on the ship featuring more prominently later. Bad Batch Season 2 is supposedly coming later this year, so depending on exactly when the Justifier set is released it may well coincide with that.

I strongly suspect that they're betting on (and/or have inside information about) it playing a more prominent role in S2 of Bad Batch. And they've also got the tie-in with Cad Bane having just appeared in TBoBF; even though the ship itself didn't show up there, he's a desirable character right now and anything connected to him will get a bump too.

For those keeping track, unless you count the Bad Batch Shuttle (which I would tend not to), the last set to include three different clones was the Clone Trooper Battle Pack in 2011, and it had only happened twice before that (in the 2007 battle pack and the 2005 Clone Turbo Tank, which had 4). The last set to include five total clones was the Republic Dropship and AT-OT in 2009 (which had 8, the most of any regular set). So the AT-TE isn't recordbreaking, but it's the most we've seen in a long time.

I don't have strong feelings about it. It looks plenty sturdy, but it's hard to say much from the screenshots. I don't think it's necessarily the case that this is any more or less accurate shape-wise than the other design, so much as just that this one looks to be based more on the Rebels version of the TIE/d while the previous one was based on the FractalSponge/Essential Guide to Warfare version.

No, nothing. There's been wild speculation about Yavin, Geonosis, various other things, but none of those suggestions spring from any sort of evidence and it's better not to propagate them. We don't even know that it'll be an MBS-style set; it could be something completely different.

I think you're going to have to lose the blue pins either way. They aren't providing any meaningful support there, so they're basically just in the way and are also an illegal connection that'll damage the pins over time. There's no real upside to them that I can see.

Ah, sorry, poor phrasing on my part. I meant "even if the process of reviewing the instructions before buying pieces did a perfect job of identifying problems", but that wasn't clear from how I wrote that sentence. Also, it looks like the other posts here have largely resolved the topic, but I should mention that I had already seen most of those images and was aware of the scope of the problems with the build, and that informed the tone of my response there. There's obviously a huge difference between 'model is hard to build' and 'model doesn't even come close to staying together', and I forgot that folks looking at this from just the info in the OP wouldn't necessarily have that context.

I very strongly disagree with you on this. Selling instructions for a model that can't actually be built is fraud, just like any other form of false advertising, and it's completely reasonable to be pissed at the designer. Especially in a case like this where they have professional branding and partnerships with other groups, including as you point out somebody selling the whole package for €700, what it boils down to is a scam ring charging quite a lot of money for defective products. Obviously it's good practice for the buyer to do their own check before spending money on pieces, and that would prevent a lot of these problems, but a) many structural issues aren't going to be detectable without actually building it and b) even if that had worked perfectly the seller would still have stolen the €9. Ultimately anybody selling anything has both a legal and ethical responsibility to determine that their products are what they say they are and do what they say they do; caveat emptor explicitly doesn't mean you can mislead your customers. You're likely right that many or most MOC sellers don't perform appropriate diligence on that, but anyone who doesn't is in the wrong. Honestly, issues like this are why I don't charge for my MOCs. I do test-build everything, but mistakes happen, and I don't want to be in that position. Once money comes into it, especially when we're talking about this much money, there's so much potential for things to get distasteful.

I mean, I haven't yet spent $2000 on a chrome gold C-3PO, but I'm probably going to at some point (and I regret not having spent $700 back when that was what they cost), so $320AU seems pretty reasonable. Plenty of people collect minifigures! Obviously you can buy the figures separately, but for something like this they usually end up costing $100+ secondhand anyway, so it usually makes more sense to just buy the whole set if it's not that much more.

Anybody know whether there will be an exclusive set at Celebration? I haven’t heard anything about one this year.

Besides the recent dewback that was already mentioned, the last molded tauntaun was just in 2016, and there haven’t been any large Hoth Rebel sets since then. All the more recent Hoth sets have been Imperial-focused, like the AT-AT, or ones like the Medical Chamber that wouldn’t make any sense to have a tauntaun, so we have no reason to think that they wouldn’t include another one the next time they make Echo Base or something related. Similarly, there’s never been a Sail Barge or Jabba’s Palace without Jabba, except for the obvious recent one that’s set after he was dead. Presumably he’ll be back as soon as there’s a set that’s appropriate to include him in.

He doesn't really sit on Cal's shoulder, though. His feet are hanging on much lower down in the middle of Cal's back, in much the same way Yoda rode on Luke's back. He is quite a bit shorter than Yoda in his usual crouched posture, no question, but not by as much as the LEGO figure size difference suggests. EDIT: Here's an angle of BD-1 more stretched out. With his legs extended he reaches from Cal's waist to just over his shoulder, which is pretty much exactly what Yoda looked like. He just hunches way over a lot of the time.

You're doing your math wrong. 0.66 m is 66 cm. You're completely right that a lot of things are sized up, of course, because the whole idea of exact scaling just doesn't make a lot of sense given that minifigures aren't proportioned remotely like humans anyway. But a brick-built Todo would have to be sized up a lot, significantly more than the other examples there, to a degree that I don't think would end up looking right.

Yes, but LEGO's Yoda is ridiculously oversized relative to a minifig. He should be around a third the height of an average human, but instead he's about 80% as tall and equally broad, so he's more than twice as tall as he should be and probably ten or twenty times as massive. In some sense I guess it would be consistent of them to hugely inflate Todo's size too, but obviously it would be nicer if he was scaled more accurately. Plus, BD-1 isn't actually all that much smaller. The folks who've 3D printed him put him about 45cm tall in his usual crouched posture and 60-70cm when standing upright, so pretty nearly the same range...

I don't think there's anything that you can confidently say LEGO won't ever make. Every now and then they put out some set that doesn't make any sense--the droid TIE fighter from Dark Empire back in 2004, the TIE Defender in 2010 (before its modern prominence in more recent media), the Sandspeeder, the 187th Legion, the Azure Angel you mentioned, etc. All stuff that hadn't been relevant to anything in decades and weren't things that the vast majority of fans would have recognized even when they'd appeared recently. Obviously it's silly to speculate about something like that if there isn't any actual reason to think it's happening, but they do pop up on occasion. Even for Force Unleashed specifically, the Shadow Trooper battle pack was just in 2015...

Yep, that is indeed what Luke's landspeeder looks like. And that's pretty much the sum of my opinions on the model.

Beru was just about the last Original Trilogy character of any importance to not have gotten a minifig, so that’s a pretty big milestone. Who would be the next most significant omission from the OT? Sy Snootles, maybe? It’s somebody way down there.