icm

As far as things somehow returning in Star Wars go, another Razor Crest is by far the instance that strains credibility the least, and is probably the least creatively bankrupt and easiest to explain of the storytelling decisions. (Death Star --> Death Star II --> Starkiller Base --> Final Order fleet) (Palpatine --> returned) (How does Luke know how to build a lightsaber offscreen between ESB and ROTJ?) (How does the Resistance rebuild and resupply offscreen between TLJ and TROS, when they literally have no ships, personnel, or materiel left at the end of TLJ?) How does Din Djarin get another Razor Crest offscreen between Mando s3 and TMAG? He does some jobs, clears some cash for carbonite, and heads to a classic car auction.

To be fair, it's not trying to do that.

Would you mind posting screencaps of the Kilmer and West cars from the game, please?

* Bat-vigilantes have hockey sticks instead of guns because Lego weirdly decides to get squeamish about guns for this one set for no reason that anybody in the know can/will explain to LAN members

The $650, 6838-piece set is now rumored to be sculptures of Bulbasaur, Squirtle, and Charmander. Why in the world aren't they releasing those as three separate sets? Each one would still be $200+ and 2000+ parts, which is not a small set. Surely they would sell more sets and bring in more revenue if the paywall for your favorite starter Pokemon was $200 instead of three times as high, and if you didn't have to buy the ones you didn't want at the same time. It reminds me of when the DC Super Heroes D2C for 2019 was rumored to be a $500 set with both the 1989 Batmobile and the 1989 Batwing, and those were eventually released as separate $250 and $200 sets in 2019 and 2020, respectively. That made sense. This does not.

Sorry, I haven't watched that Tom Hanks movie so I don't know what to say to save myself!

Honestly, this sounds great to me. I'm one of those folks who buys all the Batmobiles and doesn't have much interest in the more comics-based sets with wider casts of characters. Blame me!

"Them's fighting words!" - Redbeard and Tattooga

Well, it's a little bit longer and somewhat taller. The New Barracuda is bow + four center segments (three + brick built stern), while the New Pearl is bow + five center segments (four + brick built stern). So about eight studs longer, which isn't immediately noticeable in most comparisons.

(Never mind.)

How about a playscale Gozanti with four microscale TIE Avengers carried under the wings or a playscale Arquitens with two nanoscale TIE Avengers to launch out the front? Man, that playscale Gozanti was so cool.

Actually, come to think of it, it's actually Commodore Schmidlapp's dehydration ray invented for use in his distillery. It's the dastardly United Underworld that twists that useful, peaceful invention to nefarious ends!

It ain't that kind of movie, kid. As for the ending, it's supposed to be a comical, funny, slightly wistful ending with the moral "wouldn't we all get along better if we could just communicate with each other and put ourselves in each other's shoes?" It's the Joker's dehydration ray, Batman just hooks up an ordinary garden hose to the vials of dust that hold the dehydrated hope of humanity. But yes, Batman '66 is the GOAT, thanks for pointing that out :)

Boardroom meeting suggestion meme: Panel 1, chairman: We need some ideas for how to make the most money with our new Pokemon license! Panel 2, first speaker: Make desktop sculptures for office drones having a midlife crisis! Panel 2, second speaker: Make a couple of enormous coffee-table sculptures for the one percent! Panel 2, third speaker: Why don't we make a line of affordable playsets for kids that's sustainable for decades? Panel 3: Chairman glares at third speaker. Panel 4: Third speaker is thrown out the window of a tall building.

Sort of like the trademark squatting that led to the Razor Crest set initially being called "The Mandalorian Bounty Hunter Transport" in Europe.

I hope the 1200p $130 10+ TMaG set 75446 is the new playscale Razor Crest we've been wanting. Fingers crossed it's not the 930p $150 10+ TMaG set 75447. If this year's CTT sets any precedent for heavy-armor SW builds, 75447 will be the TMaG AT-AT walker.

If you're in the United States it has to be the Black Pearl. Bluebrixx doesn't ship to the USA anymore, thanks to You-Know-Who. But seriously, I'd say go for the Black Pearl. It's got a better hull shape and the fun mechanical gun deck, the parts quality is better, and it has few to no stickers. I'm no cheerleader Lego purist anymore, but I still find that Lego has the best part quality in the business, and good part quality is very important for a pleasant build. Cobi parts have the same quality of molding and fit, but they have tighter clutch which I don't like as much. The quality of the parts Bluebrixx sources have improved a lot between the first Bluebrixx kit I bought (the Star Trek TOS shuttlecraft in 2022) and the most recent (the Queen Anne's Revenge in 2025), but they're still alternately mushy or stiff or loose. You really notice the reduced parts quality most on the tiny little parts and the big plates. Standard 1-by-X plates and bricks have good enough quality that I don't really notice much difference. Edit - You're in Belgium, not the US. I'd still say go for the Black Pearl, but you'll be satisfied with the Queen Anne's Revenge too. Both are good ships. I would say that the Queen Anne's Revenge from Bluebrixx is the only one of the big off-brand pirate ships that's worth getting, because it's the only one that attempts to be a reasonably accurate rendition of a real vessel with realistic proportions and details. All the other giant Chinese pirate ship kits on Amazon or AliExpress or what have you are garish caricatures that have lots of firing cannons, lots of interior space, and lots of sails, but no sense of proportion or realism or even good taste, while the giant realistic sailing ship MOCs you can get from no name MOC shops are probably quite fragile and will probably have parts of very dubious quality, not to mention the lack of printed instructions and the dodgy legality of the whole thing. If you're going to get a great big pirate ship kit, it's gotta be the Bluebrixx Queen Anne's Revenge or the Lego Black Pearl. Your choice basically comes down to whether you would rather have the mechanical gun deck or the full interior.

I was going to say that happened in 2021 with the 4+ Batmobile at $30, the Classic TV Batmobile at $30, and the Tumbler at $40, but it turns out the 4+ Batmobile and the Classic TV Batmobile were April releases while the Tumbler was an October release, so they weren't actually all released at the same time.

I've talked about wanting to rebuild this ship in Barracuda colors without the lower hull and the gun mechanism for relatively cheap, but that was before seeing high-res pictures, reviews, and speed builds of the actual set. Now that I've seen those, I've completely changed my mind. This is a brilliant set and I'd rather have the set in the box than try to build a modified version myself. I don't want to pay $380 for it, but I don't yet know what an appropriate price would be on a per-weight basis. This summer, I was lucky enough to get the Bluebrixx model of the Queen Anne's Revenge before tariffs hit, and I built it early last month. That's a great big pirate ship with a realistic hull, a reasonably interesting build, a full interior, and 40 firing cannons, which is theoretically what I really wanted. It's got seven middle hull segments plus bow and stern hull segments, and it cost about $280 USD. I'm glad I have it, but in the six or seven weeks since I built it I haven't taken off the top deck or removed the pop-out hull modules for play even once. Instead it just sits on my desk looking pretty and taking up space. I also rebuilt my copy of the original Black Seas Barracuda this summer, so I know well what a great Lego pirate ship it is for play and how good it looks on the shelf. With those in mind, I see the new Black Pearl as a surprisingly good middle ground. It's a great big pirate ship with a realistic hull and a very interesting build, and at five middle hull segments plus a bow hull segment it's about the same length as the previous largest playscale pirate ship, the 10210 Imperial Flagship from 2010. Obviously the hull, cabin, and masts are much more realistically shaped in the new Black Pearl than in the old Imperial Flagship, while the Imperial Flagship had much more interior space for play. Comparing the play value to the Black Seas Barracuda, though, it's surprisingly similar. There's the cabin, the rowboat, the anchor, and about the same volume or more in accessible holds. Every past Lego pirate ship has had the firing cannons, but honestly those are kind of tedious for play when you want to run out the guns for the whole broadside, and there was never really that much room to pose minifigures in the gun deck of the Barracuda anyway. Seems to me, judging from my experence with the Barracuda and the Bluebrixx Queen Anne's Revenge, that the broadside mechanism for the brick-built guns is a very fair trade in play for the individual firing of a few firing cannons. The lower hull also looks great. Alas, the list of recent Lego ships I want is already very long, as wanted lists are wont to be: Black Pearl Temple Bounty Going Merry River Steamboat Endurance Titanic As well as wanting to bricklink the Fire Nation Ship, a white-hull Imperial Flagship, a nougat-hull playscale Black Pearl and Brick Bounty and Brickbeard-Bounty ... And saving for the Enterprise-D ... And saving to get my wife Rivendell, Balrog, and Shire .... So many amazing sets, so little time/money/space .... and such high prices ....

Thanks for the WIP pictures, the write up, and the instructions. This is another great alt build. Sleek, functional, a good adaptation of a different IP into the CS style. The Ranger is ridiculous, but it's an entertaining movie with great music.

The price and the lack of an interior don't do the ship any favors for me, but I do like the shape of the separable upper hull above the waterline. I hope the support structure for the angled quarterdeck won't get in the way of retrofitting a larger interior, because it the main hull still looks like a good candidate for rebuilding with reddish brown hull parts and Barracuda colors.

If it's embedded in a build and reduces the number of stacked stud connections in that part of the build compared to a regular plate or brick, it's probably intended to reduce stress on parts.

I wouldn't exactly call it a "bombshell" to say that Lego sets use a lot more plates than bricks now. That's an observation I've made to myself years ago and it's a trend that dates back decades. Personally, I would date it as far back as 2004, when new wedge plates, new hinge plates, and new building styles allowed the remakes of the Snowspeeder and Millennium Falcon, and the first version of the AT-AT, to achieve their shapes mostly with wedge plates set on hinges. The first Snowspeeder, from 1999, is mostly made of bricks, while the second Snowspeeder, from 2004, is mostly made of plates. I wouldn't say it hurts rebuildability at all, and I certainly wouldn't say there's any nefarious agenda in it.

Awesome, thank you so much! This is really an amazing alt build. It could almost be the A model; it could almost be the UCS X-wing itself. I downloaded the instructions this morning.

They do - it's very common to have tiles under wide or long plates in order to make things easier to assemble or disassemble.