dvogon

If they use I hope the UCS MF will not be a Minecraft version one with a fairly limited color palette and those pieces are just on top to hide the real MF. With that many pieces, an interior is still possible, maybe not a complete one, but at least those sections that are seen in the movies.

Yes, this is something I never understand. If a piece is going to be hidden and it helps to have less errors building, that's ok, but when the piece is going to be seen... just don't get it. With the sides open they give an unfinished look, quite the opposite of the external look. And then there are those red pin connectors... why insist lego on using that color in the destroyers when black would be much better?

Yup! I made that sometime ago for my children using set 7965 just with four width studs, the new UCS MF has 6 studs + 2 at both sides, as shown in the last teaser, so it should have plenty of space there... A bit tight and a slighter longer cockpit but more than enough for them to play with :)

On the tatooine battlepack, I see a similar approach with the bounty hunter battlepack. But 2 jawas is odd, we already had 2 of those in the scape pod. I like having a tusken raider though, even if one appears in Luke's speeder. Is that confirmed? Either another kind of robot or creature would fit better than the second jawa I guess, sigh!

Hope that too to have a better price! If there is a BB8 and no interior to put the droid in... that would be weird. @marshal-banana after seeing the video in slow motion, you hit the spot! Six studs inside plus 1 at each side plus the circular surroundings. If it is smaller than the old MF at all, it will be just by a small fraction.

Did TLG make this kind of pre-announcement on twitter before for other UCS sets? They should be very confident on the set for doing this sort of things.

Although the only slight evidence of an interior of the MF is the increased pieces count, which could be perfectly used exclusively to increase the detail of the exterior, I do think that having an interior actually increases the display value of the set. Given the pieces count, I would only sacrifice the interior if the exterior is not detailed enough. A more global attention to the details would lead to take care of both aspects of the designed item, differentiating it more from the previous set and making it more unique.

Wow! I've seen the modified image of the paper-covered huge UCS box, but seeing the image filter in action is just impressive. Jump to offset 1:00 min at https://youtu.be/Xn_H2R6wwhE

Final price really depends on the ratio of smaller vs bigger pieces. For instance, the Tower Bridge (10214) has 4295 pieces for 230€. The amount of smaller pieces is higher than typical SW sets. The new Ninjago city set (70620) has 4867 pieces for 300€. A more detailed MF would have for sure a greater smaller vs bigger ratio than usual SW sets. More if it has some sort of interior.

10188 has 264 pages for 3803 pieces. A quick extrapolation for 497 pages, as the build will have at least a similar complexity, would give 7159 pieces.

It should be pages count, volume is far greater than 2.56. It's funny that they have edited the photo, somehow an indirect acknowledge that there was something behind the white paper of the mistery box.

We had two recent examples of poor 'remakes': the TFA MF only with minor tweaks, not even a handle for childrens to play... (even if it sells well) and the UCS Death Star where even less brain power was thrown into it. Then we also have the UCS Sandcrawler or the UCS tie fighter which are really big inprovements over previous sets. We'll see... but a poor UCS MF carboncopy of 10179 would be very disappointing for such flagship set.

I was wondering how TLG would be able to make a MF interior without incresasing too much pieces count and price. A design option would be to decrease the size of the old MF by 10-15%, making a greater decrease in volume hence in weight and structural pieces, which are usually big. This approach would give some space for smaller (and cheaper) pieces for the interior.

Best deals for sealed sets are from big stores during clearing out times. I got the UCS tie fighter with 40% off from Toysrus.