MaximillianRebo

That's my feeling too. It's the equivalent of misplaced punctuation and then seeing which version of the document shows up online and tracing it back to the source. Exactly. At the end of the day, the set is going to be announced/released and up until that point it could be any variation of Clone vehicle and no amount of Telephone or leak speculation is going to change what ends up on the shelves. Regarding the Falchion Tank (whether or not that's the actual set), no one is mentioning that it featured in Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars. I actually remember it far more from the RTS levels of that game than the Zillo Beast episodes of TCW and Lego would have a model, at least digitally, of that vehicle in their archives if they decided to go that route.

But what about the raw materials that are used in the production of sets? I know the US is one of the bigger producers of ABS plastic in the world, but can they produce enough locally to satisfy the demand of this new mega-factory? Even if the sets themselves aren't imports, any tariffs on international sourced materials will add to production costs and therefore the final point of sale price. And since it's going to be a few years until the factory opens, prices will presumably rise in the meantime. Even when the factory is fully operational - and for the sake of argument using 100% locally produced materials - those price increases are already baked in, and there's no way TLG is reducing prices just because tariffs no longer apply. I'm no economist and happy to be proved wrong, but I don't see the cork ever going back in the bottle on this one.

My first reaction to the helmet pic was "wow, they've really captured it well" but on closer inspection it turns out every major detail is a sticker (or print), none of the silver is brick built. Non-humans making the best brick built characters is a lesson Lego should have taken to heart more after Constraction; the only Brickhead I own is the Tusken, for exactly that reason. I agree with others that Palpatine should have looked more like the Chancellor than the Emperor (he looks more like his ROTJ appearance), especially with Mace included in the set, but this plays back into the earlier point about human Brickheadz - a robed Palpatine does look better in this form. I'd be really curious to know how much it will cost to part out Kylo's shuttle (minus the printed plaque), it's gotta be considerably less than the exorbitant retail price. Regarding the Slave 1 naming situation, one of the booklet photos shows a reference to 'Oovo 4' and how Jango got his ship; I guess TLG is indicating that they're aware of the origins of the ship's name, even if they've been instructed not to use it for the set.

Two more mini-rigs, almost done with the full set! Armored Sentinel Transport AST-5 A one person craft with the pilot lying down inside the cockpit area. The wings rotate so the hatch can open with the pilot upright, or with the vehicle sitting flat on the ground. The guns also rotate. The vehicle is always pictured as used by Jabba's guards so I put in a Weequay as the pilot Personnel Deployment Transport PDT-8 A droid - or possibly troop - transport used in and around Echo Base (at least according to the box art). A small repulsorlift craft used for easily moving around the Rebel's base on Hoth for example with Artoo and an FX-7 Medical Droid Ewok catapult Not really a mini-rig but this was also sold as part of the Kenner line. Lego has produced several catapults to go with their playsets; my goal here was to make a more detailed model matching as close as possible to the Kenner original. Unfortunately the only Ewok I own is the recent Advent Calendar model but hey, still an Ewok. I was originally planning to stop here as the only mini-rig left is the Imperial Shuttle Pod, and as it's basically just a mini version of the ROTJ Imperial Shuttle I wasn't planning to do a MOC of this one. But, since I'm so close to MOCcing every mini-rig produced I figured why not? So there's currently a design half finished sitting on Studio. Instructions for all of my own builds are free on Rebrickable: https://rebrickable.com/users/MaximillianBricks/mocs/?tag=21928

I grew up with the big 3 of Space, Castle and Pirates and full disclosure - when the first Lego Star Wars sets launched I pooh-poohed them as Lego 'selling out', even though I also grew up with Star Wars and had many of the Kenner toys. I got older, and I got over it, and accepted that both could live side by side. I agree that a lot of this dislike of licensed sets and digs at them lacking 'creativity' is masking a big chunk of nostalgia and a desire to go back to 'the good old days' of Lego. Or ... this is just a lot of trolling to bait people (me included) into engaging.

There's a false dichotomy being pushed in some comments that licensed theme are inherently uncreative, therefore they should be scrapped in favour of unlicensed themes which of course must therefore by definition be creative. A Hogwarts or Helicarrier set isn't creative but Hidden Side sets, which follow fairly well trodden horror tropes, are. Putting aside that all licensed sets have started life on someone's drawing board - just not a Lego designer - I'd argue that even within Lego there's still a level of creativity involved, not in concept but in design. Anyone who's built a MOC knows that it's not always a straightforward process to slap a bunch of bricks and plates together and say 'yep, that absolutely looks like an X-Wing'. Solving the various shape, stability and part usage issues involves a fair amount of creative thinking to design a Lego model that looks as close as possible to real life (or on the big screen), or simply working out how to bring together a system of parts that was in large part designed before the first Star Wars movie was released and using them to create a recognisable and detailed Millennium Falcon.

This is true. All this speculation about which figures will be included and not one mention of Mr. Stephens.

That micro fighter looks great. Always happy to be getting an extra astromech head, even if it will go on a spare Artoo body which won't line up colour wise. Yes the AT-RT is too big, but Lego is always going to favour stability over accurate scaling and there's a point below which everything starts to become single stud or single clip connections to keep the size down, which is why most official builds of small vehicles are oversized by a factor of 2 or more. I know there are many minifig scale AT-RT mocs out there, but I wonder how many of them fall apart when looked at the wrong way. Regarding the Andor poster, there's a lot of interesting stuff that could have been official sets but aren't (fingers crossed for the future), but on the flip side there's no U-Wing on the poster and we are getting that.

This is what I'd like to see too - more aliens, Jabba's guards, Cantina patrons, Coruscant citizens etc. rather than wall to wall factions. Figs with a mix and match component to them would be excellent. Yes I know, it's a 'battle' pack and you have to 'build your army' but as someone who grew up with City and Space people packs this would be a welcome change/addition. Maybe they could continue with the blister packs they tried a couple of years ago and make those non factional and keep the actual battle packs for the rest.

He means Millennium Falcon right? ... Right? Sets 75295 & 75193 - the MF MFs. On the other hand if this was Renown we'd all be speculating about the upcoming Palpatine's Arrest remake

Solid Brix finished up his large scale Geonosis MOC I think in the last month or two, so it's possibly a bunch of people jumping on that bandwagon, or indicative that the type of people who right now have enough disposable income to build large location MOCs and free time to bring them to conventions fall into the demographic that grew up on TCW. Lego set design has much longer lead times that just what's hot right now, but I guess they've got enough market research from the last 5 years or so telling them that a strategy of clones, clones and more clones is a profit maker for them.

Since it's only percentages, there's no way to know what the actual numbers are. Possibly the number of kids playing with Lego went up also, or even just stayed the same, but the numbers of adults in the hobby increased by a lot more.

I often see the years 2010-13 referred to as 'the golden age of Lego Star Wars' and I think a big contributing factor for many people was the large amount of Clone Wars sets being released during those years, primarily because that was the only new media at the time. In comparison the following years would look like a trickle to clone fans, even though there was still a steady stream of clone sets being produced, as you pointed out. Also with the sheer volume of sets produced during 2015-19 to tie in with a new movie every single year (almost double the total number of sets per year compared to what we have now) again the clone sets would appear greatly reduced when that wasn't the case. Percentage wise the amount of clone sets in the 'movie' years was a huge drop compared to the 'golden' years, but I think based purely on the number of clone sets released the difference was nowhere near as pronounced.

I agree completely. Take the main OT Rebel ships, it's only being the X-Wing that's readily available; 8 years since an OT Y-Wing and 6 years since any variant of that ship, similar numbers for the A-Wing and over a decade for the B-Wing. TIEs have had a good run recently and it's only the TIE Advanced remaining, but prior to the last couple of years there were big gaps in the TIE lineup for anyone who hadn't been in the game for 20+ years. It's even been 5 years since the last Landspeeder... Sure there are completionists who have one of every vehicle ever released up to this point, but that's only a tiny fraction of the overall market.

Everyone's forgetting about GONK.