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I think you're right about that. Lego is facing some pretty steep competition down-market, and when established firms face price competition downrange it's usually easier to move upmarket than to address the problems in their cost structures that make them vulnerable to price pressure. That rarely ends well for the established firm, because they cede their base markets and become reliant on the top end of the market.

Does it? Clearly TLJ follows right on the heels of TFA, but I don't know what the time gap between TLJ and TROS is in the lore. I figured it must be at least a couple of years.

That was also incredibly puzzling and disappointing to me as a kid when LSW was just starting out. It makes sense in retrospect though. They only had a limited number of set slots, so the first TIE fighter they made was the main villain's personal ship.

As a kid who was really excited for the very first Lego Star Wars sets, it was incredibly disappointing and puzzling that there weren't any stormtroopers for two whole years.

Set 7128 in 1999 had two scout troopers. A minifig pack in 2000 also had two scout troopers. The first stormtroopers weren't released until 2001.

Is the new small raptor body the same as the Atrociraptor body from JWD? The velociraptor chase set with the humvee-styled off-roader looks great. It's a unique, chunky, solid, detailed 4x4 and the ppp isn't bad. The baby dinosaur mold is neat too. The set with the jungle temple is great. The ruins will go perfectly with Adventurers, Indiana Jones, or City jungle explorers, the 6x6 off-roader is an interesting build with neat styling and side-by-side seating, and the helicopter looks pretty good too. I really hope I can get the set without the dinosaurs for half-price. The T-rex and boat set is still overpriced, but I'm glad they put the T-rex into a smaller set this wave instead of paywalling it at the highest or second-highest price points, or putting a version with wild pastel colors in a 4+ set. Such an iconic dino should always be as easily accessible as an X-wing or a Batmobile. The gas station set reminds me of the gas station scene from the second book. I guess the screenwriter was really mining the books for any previously unused scenes he could find. The mosasaurus boat set is definitely the odd one out here. If they're going to put "brick-built mosasaurus" in the name of the set, they should have just included the mosasaurus and then really emphasized the rebuildability of a brick-built dinosaur by including B and C models like a Creator 3-in-1 set. I bet there are going to be loads of alt builds on Rebrickable.

It's possible I'll like it better once I see the full pictures, but for now I'm not impressed by the new U-wing. The troop bay of the 2016 model was already pretty small and cramped, but at least it had sliding doors. It doesn't look like the new model has a decent front/lower windscreen, and that was one of the best parts of the first version. If they were going to brick-build the engines instead of using the big 4w cylinder pieces like last time, they should have scaled them down to 3w instead of 4w to match the reduced scale of the ship. As it is, the engines are the same diameter as on the old set but they're a lot clunkier and blockier around the middle. But it does look a lot lighter and easier to swoosh than the old model, and that's not a bad thing.

Yeah, Cobi is very high quality. Most other brands have better print quality than Lego, but Cobi is the only other brand to have the same glossy finish on the parts and the same not-too-loose, not-too-tight, just-right clutch power.

My Pick-a-Brick Standard order from December 9 finally shipped today.

But if you did that, would the sets turn out good, bad, or ugly?

Actually, Mega is still going strong. It's just not the only alternative brand on anybody's radar anymore.

Where did you read that?

I already reported that post as being from an AI bot.

I think they could get away with a Chinook. Civilian variants of the Chinook are real and they've been used for decades in oil and gas work. A civilian variant of the Osprey was only hypothetical.

Nice work. Reminds me of the Imperial Trading Post.

I, for one, am loving the quality and selection of the vehicles from City for the past couple of years. But I agree that there haven't been many City buildiings lately.

I guess that means it'll be another couple of weeks before I get my December 9 order.

@Lion King, well said. It's the verisimilitude in the first Jurassic Park movies of pretending, or trying to pretend, that these are real dinosaurs that look and act like real dinosaurs would look and act, that distinguishes the creatures from generic movie monsters. Once that's gone, and the franchise just makes a lot of mutant, hybrid, or custom dinos that are acknowledged to be made up, custom, and fictional, then there's nothing special about them. Just movie monsters like any other monsters from any other movie.

That truck is not Ferrari branded and neither car is in Ferrari colors. You can't blame me for not knowing this was the set you meant. It is, definitively, not a Ferrari truck.

What Ferrari truck set?

I must admit, I am one of those folks who's not usually very interested in Technic, but I'm a sucker for Space sets. If it's anything like the picture, I'll probably get it as soon as it hits 20% off.

They don't need to have classic existing factions to be proper Space sets. I bought all the Space sets in all the themes precisely because of that cross promotion even though I don't usually buy Friends or Technic, and I don't like the vast majority of the Dreamz theme.

Don't forget the black diorama base with a forgettable non-spoiler quote from another movie and the pile of rubble on a patch of dirt.

I, too, remember reading about the SW license renewal negotiations back in 2006 or so. I distinctly remember being worried that Lego was going to drop the license and there weren't going to be any new Star Wars sets in 2007. I told my mom and sister all about it as we were driving to Walmart. Not coincidentally, the run of Space from 2007 (not 2008) through 2013 happened on that renegotiated Star Wars license before it was renegotiated again with the Disney buyout. @danth has been quite vocal about blaming the lack of Space since 2013 on the license terms of that buyout, and this statement by Christian Faber seems to support that idea. Does anyone know what year the most recent Star Wars license renewal began? Was it 2022, coinciding with the Monkie Kid Galactic Explorer and the Icons Galaxy Explorer? That would make the first license run 1999-2006, the second license run 2007-2013, the third license run 2014-2021, and the fourth license run 2022+. Those work be 8 years, 7 years, and 8 years, so those would seem to be consistent lengths of license terms and consistent intervals of license renegotiations.

Huh. Well, there it is. Clearly they were able to renegotiate some concessions later, since Space Police III and Galaxy Squad are as out-there as any pre-2000 Space themes and we've had some honest-to-goodness Space sets in the last few years (though labeled as other themes, with a cross-theme Space logo on the box), but maybe there's still some gremlin lurking in the license that meant they were legally obligated to shoehorn last year's Space sets into other themes. I also recently saw on Reddit a magazine scan from 2000 where Lego's marketing manager said they couldn't do Star Trek because they were focusing on Star Wars. I'm glad Lego has had enough weight recently to start making Space sets again, even if they are snuck in under Monkie Kid, Icons, Gift With Purchase, City, Friends, Dreamz, Creator 3-in-1, Collectible Minifigures, and Technic. I hope they can keep doing that for a long time. Side note: A few days ago I built the new Renegade, the new City spaceship, and the classic Space Police II Galactic Mediator. The Renegade is a great set overall, but I find its shape hard to swoosh and I don't trust the clip joints enough to subject them to heavy mix-and-match play cycles. The City spaceship is really awkward and gangly with the lab module in the back, and I like it much better as a medium-sized spaceship with the lab module separated as a ground base - which is honestly the design intent! So, in my opinion, CS'24 still needs a big 918-class spaceship, because the 60446 is best as a smaller 924-class transport. As for the Galactic Mediator, I was quite surprised by how lightweight, rigid, and swooshable it is. After all these years, it might still be the best toy of the three.