BrickCommander

Meanwhile, New York City: a BEST TOY OF THE YEAR 2016 award goes to The LEGO Group for Star Wars: The Force Awakens Millennium Falcon (best boy toy)! Neat!

Holy crow! This reminds me of ... umm. Sorry, I'm drawing a blank here. Anyone? ;)

No way! A LEGO Star Wars set that is out of scale ..?! This is an outrage!

There! Straight from the DK visual dictionary. Let's get rumors of a "UCS Rey's Snow Speeder" started already. You know it will be coming :p Now shut up and go and buy the damn things! ;)

Why, you slimy, double-crossing, no-good swindler! You've got a lot of guts coming here, after what you pulled. (Lando Calrissian in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK)

Isn't this a little short for a Star Destroyer ..?

Can't tell, won't tell :p But generally speaking, with all the new movies coming out, the Classic Trilogy still being strong and the Rebels tv-show going into its 3rd season, anything prequel-related will have to get in line behind them all. Not quite stellar odds, considering. But as Han Solo himself said: "never tell me the odds!" ;)

Haha, it doesn't work like that. Sure, we designers can have parts ordered in new colors, but they have to be for a new product, not just for fun. As it happens, one of the painted element will come out in exactly this color in a new set of mine later next year! ;) The summer I was referring to was 2013, with the model being finished sometime in autumn. Then the launch got delayed until Jan 2015.

I had to paint a few elements in dark blue, most notably the large quarter-round elements at the front of the ship. The 4x4 roof corner is also not available in yellow.

These 2 copies from the final model review were put together over 2 years ago and kept in the Star Wars area at LEGO in exactly this position on their display stands. Instead of throwing them away I turned one into Jango's and kept both. They are not glued or anything and exactly as they have been all the time, nobody has touched them. Today I took them on their first journey to the photo room: As you can see the "gap" isn't one bit wider than on the day they were built. So I'd say you shouldn't worry about your own Slave One, even if you keep it on display in flying mode all the time.

Modifying sets and posting pictures is perfectly fine of course, be it cosmetic improvements or more technical upgrades like a landing gear for the 75105 Falcon*. In fact I like checking out what fans come up with. Been there myself once :) It just becomes a problem when certain individuals, a lit torch in one hand and murder in their eyes, get on a crusade because the final set wasn't designed the way THEY think it should have been. On a LEGO set there is always a reason why things are how they are, and those reasons are not always obvious. *the modded landing gear on that 75105 has no stopper in down position, the liftarms are pushing against the plates on which the rest of the ship is built on - an absolute NO GO in a set. It would also be considered tedious and not fun for kids having to operate all 4 landing legs manually. Just in case you were wondering why the Falcon has fixed landing legs in the set

Anio, if you want to lock vertically down the whole inside of the cockpit, an 11 unit long technic beam would be off by only 1 plate. That's actually not that bad - raising the 1x6 technic brick the seat is attached to by one plate would make it fit. Unfortunately doing this would almost certainly get you a "NO GO" (as in "no fricking way!!!") from the building instruction collegues who know they simply cannot show the placement of locking beams going down as far as these INSIDE the model in the instructions the way they want, even if there weren't other beams in the way already at that point.

I am afraid it does a bit more than that. Even if that connection were "legal" (meaning 100% in LEGO-building system, which given the angles involved would be a HUGE coincidence) what it would do is greatly increase the risk of the final product breaking under stress! The brick you are attaching to is sitting unlocked in a brick-build section of the model. This means it is only surrounded by other bricks and not attached to anything secure in a vertical way (with plates or technic beams). Only the pilot seat is supposed to connect to that brick. But if you would connect that loooooooooong "handle" of the slave One to that element we are suddenly talking about a whole different amount of force applied than just the small turning function of the seat. Rough handling would quickly tear the bricks in the cockpit area apart and break the model. Our engineers would have spotted this immediately. It took me as a designer a little bit longer, and you as fan builders didn't see it at all. Which is ok since you most likely handle your sets with care and don't have to worry about product quality. But it also demonstrates why our development system make sense: professional designers designing, professional engineers checking the designers' work, and fans ... giving us all your money! :) To sum it up: this modification would NOT be OK for a LEGO product, but is ok to do on your own 75060 - on your own risk!

The wording may be a bit sloppy, I give you that, but like I explained earlier this is just ME talking, not an official speaker for LEGO or a marketeer. Sloppy maybe, but nevertheless a reality in product design. As you may know, one LEGO motto is "only the best is good enough" - which is quite often misunderstood. It does NOT mean sparing absolutely no expenses making product that, in the end, will even lose you money. That is the way into bancruptcy. It rather means making the best product possible under the circumstances, while always striving to do even better. 75060 was the best we could do at that time, I can say that without reservation.