Darth Caedus

The AT-TE has been in all the Rebels trailers and promos for many months now, nothing about that is a spoiler.

It'll never be Poe. He's the only named character unique to the X-wing, which will still be on shelves for many months more. A microfighter would hamstring sales of the full-size vehicle - so many parents would then just buy the kid the little microfighter with Poe to get the kid to shut up rather than shell out for the big X-wing as a gift. Poe certainly will pop up in more sets in the future, but I doubt we'll see any major TFA leads in Microfighters anytime soon. They wouldn't even put the damn Inquisitor in the TIE Prototype, when he's only in a $40 kit, a one-season character, and will have milked his appeal for a full year by then.

They'll be January 1st. Don't get your hopes up. TRU might jump the gun late in the holiday season, but why pay their inflated prices anyways? Stoked to start accumulating that Imperial battlepack. As good as the Rebel one is, an Imperial Technician AND battle-scarred Stormies in the same pack is a dream come true. Nice to also see the official term for that grey AT-DP pilot variant - "Imperial Combat Driver". I'll pick up one of the bike just for him, even though I've got like three Kanans already...

Agreed. Rebels battlepack is spectacular, a real home run. Vehicle looks good and getting not only a Rodian but a Duros for battlepack price? It's a dream come true, two alien species knocked off the list in a single blow - and even better you can just swap out their heads for your own use with generic fleshtone human heads.

Clearly fake, Dark Troopers are not canon. Minifig overkill, battlepacks based on Battlefront II classes - weak trash rumors.

Plagueis is definitely better - that was the final great masterwork of the old EU before its deletion. It made midichlorians fit into the story, for pete's sake. It managed to make Phantom Menace interesting. Tarkin is still a very good novel, though - second or third best novel of the new canon (above the solid Lords of the Sith, the decent Dark Disciple, and the horrendous Heir to the Jedi - A New Dawn is unquestionably the best as a fully cohesive work that's also a beautifully paced and well-crafted Star Wars story, Tarkin and Aftermath are just a notch below it). Too bad NYCC is just Nexo Knights, guess we'll be waiting a bit longer for more information on January kits. It'd be nice to get a definitive setlist, what we have right now is extremely scattershot (Anakin's pod? A-wing? etc.)

I'd take the Mustafar Eta-2 approach. $40 set with the starfighter as the main centerpiece and several minifigs. Vader's Eta-2 appears in Lords of the Sith as well, so you could easily flesh out a solid array of characters: Vader, Tarkin, Vader's astromech, Cham Syndulla, and an additional Twi'lek (you could do Isval, Cham's female second-in-command, or a generic Twi'lek freedom fighter). I don't see new-Vader in a $25 set, so it seems more reasonable for him to appear in a padded starfighter kit with some desirable minifigures.

Yeah, amongst all the needless Jedi Starfighters, Obi-wan's red Eta-2 is an essential ship from Episode III that has effectively never been available to the consumer (I know when the EpIII stuff hit, I had already gotten Anakin's fighter as the 'preview' early release set so couldn't justify a second purchase in the USB pack). Though honestly, of all the Prequel things, I quite like Jedi Starfighters. I'll buy as many Eta-2's as they can throw at us. However, what really should be done next is Darth Vader's black Eta-2: it features in the canonical Tarkin novel and has already been a Hasbro toy. It'd be a killer set even though there isn't technically a visual reference as of yet.

Not exactly. Only just this year has Lego finally gotten the TIE fighter correct with the Rebels one and the FO TIE. We need reworks of all other TIEs in this modern, perfected style: Vader's, the Interceptor, the Bomber are the highest priorities.

No way. Way too many parts to bricklink, and I would want LEGO's official version. The whole model is black/orange, it's not an easy palette-swap.

A-wing and X-wing are long gone at this point. I'd recommend the TIE Prototype or the B-wing, they're both solid sets. For a less mainstream choice, consider Anakin's Custom Jedi Starfighter, it's a fun build. Personally I adore the HH-87 Starhopper, excellent functionality and a great build, trickier to find these days though but I've still seen them in smaller toy stores (Go! Games & Toys for example). The first few pages of Aftermath also reveal that it's Wedge Antilles' personal undercover starfighter, making it an OT vessel as well as a Clone Wars one.

I like it too. However, it's clearly just Poe's specific X-wing, and I want to buy at least 3 normal blue/white Resistance X-wings. I just fear we won't see a release of a recolor until Episode VIII at the earliest, since they wouldn't want to have 2 similar X-wings on the shelves at once.

I'd recommend expanding your personal view of the canon, there has been a lot of excellent material released this year. The STAR WARS and DARTH VADER comics in particular have been really quite superb. Use this as your reference point, this is what is canon in Star Wars: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_canon_media The build of the Carbon chamber is important as it influences how many I'm going to pick up, hope to see it soon. I doubt we'll be seeing an Ugo battlepack anytime soon so I'm inclined to get at least three or four...if the parts are weak I'll just BL them though.

Your crusade against interiors is extremely odd and shows a fundamental lack of understanding regarding LEGO's design ideology. The minimalist, nearly-bare interiors are exclusively for basic City sets which are strictly geared for little kids. Ghostbusters is a theme with massive AFOL and general adult appeal, and for kids who love the franchise and want a really big gift for their birthday. This is more than enough of a market to tap into. Expecting LEGO to release "two versions" is hilarious in its absurdity, why waste 2 slots in a line on the same kit when you can do one right? A tiny fraction of fans, even AFOLs, put their sets inside display cases, so the 'only exterior matters' attitude is incredibly niche. I struggle to even think of a set they made which was exterior-only - the Death Star II? And that wasn't cheap so affordability goes out the window there. The bottom line: LEGO kits which run hundreds of dollars/pounds absolutely *are* affordable to enough people that they all sell very well. If you want $50 sets, there are lots of them out there, the big expensive Exclusives take up a very small portion of the overall selection. You're thinking about this the wrong way - it's your wallet that has to stretch to fit LEGO, not LEGO who has to stretch to accommodate your wallet. The Helicarrier proved that you can make a successful $350 licensed set, so a massive Ghostbuster firehouse is a perfect followup to that revelation. Honestly, I really don't get why you would want them to gimp the design and make it under $100 - 4600 pieces makes this one of the all-time biggest LEGO sets, and the biggest available right now! That's awesome and worthy of celebration!

Definitely no Rebels Stormies for the Battlefront pack - no worries there. I think we stand a decent chance of UCS Boba in the Carbon set because it has so few figures. Carbonite Han, Boba, and an Ugnaught is really not that much. I do hope it's not that old Skiff version.

Don't worry, you didn't miss anything. 7666 is pretty terrible, I took mine out of storage the other day and was very disappointed. Broke it down for parts. Any UCS Hoth Base will definitely have the iconic door design, so I'm not worried.

some more edits. Got a bunch of normal Mandos. Imperial Navy Troops are the priority armybuilder.

For the TIE Interceptor, I'm just gonna wait for a re-release. It's this or the TIE Bomber that has to be next in line, they've both been a decade (or more, for the bomber) without a modern version.

Remember, don't buy the 2015 Advent Calendar just for the Jawa, though - we're getting 2 for ~$25 in the Droid Escape in January.

No, it was smart to restrict BB8 to the expensive sets on the first wave. Those who might have settled for a cheaper set will stretch to get BB8. And those that won't even consider an $80 gift, even for the holidays - they're too cheap to be Lego's target audience in the first place. But it's not like this is the end of the world - BB8 will inevitably show up in a cheaper set in six, 12, maybe 18 months - you know he's gonna be around for all 3 movies as he's the 'new R2' - because unlike villains, who Lego prefers to keep pricelocked to expensive kits as much as possible, droid characters regularly show up in $25 sets (Jedi Starfighters, The Phantom, etc.) Not a good comparison - we're talking specifically about remakes within the Lego SW line. Unlicensed themes are utterly irrelevant, especially since many of them exist solely in relation to licensed themes (Pirates 2015 one-off wave being an obvious prelude to Pirates 5 merchandise). In the Lego SW line, the era of remakes is indeed dramatically, definitively over - basically everything from the OT that continues to be included in the line is bound to be a remake since so much OT has been produced, but that's not what this refers to - it's remakes of new ships and scenes. 10 years might as well be eternity - nobody here in their right mind would want to wait a decade for a redo of Kylo Ren's shuttle or the Transporter or whatever other kits people are complaining about. In 10 years folks could be out of the hobby, could have moved on, could be living in a country where Lego is too expensive, could be dead, etc. etc. Sure, many Phantom Menace remakes took close to 10 years, but there were a lot that happened much more quickly (Republic Gunship, Grievous Starfighter, Vulture Droids, etc.) Those are the remakes that have dulled some members' senses here, making them apathetic and leading them to believe that we have not entered a dramatically new era of SW Lego. From 2006 through mid-2015 Lego had nothing new to produce outside of TCW besides remakes and reworks of existing vehicles (and covering the few vehicles that had not yet been tackled). My point is that those days are definitively done, because at most we get about 3-ish waves of Lego SW per year, and with at least 1 new SW movie and 1 new season of SW TV (not to mention video games!) releasing every single year, that leaves no time for remakes of sets from the new movies - why make a remake when there's so much unproduced material. The only way we see an updated Kylo Ren's Shuttle is if it ends up being a prominent vehicle in Episode VII, VIII, and IX, and even then, I highly doubt we'll see one for at least 6 years or more.

As I've stated elsewhere many times, this is incorrect. The era of remakes is over, definitively - there is a new Star Wars movie coming out every single year. The only slots not taken up by battlepacks, Rebels sets, sets for each year's new film, and microfighters will be filled by keeping the OT and little bits of the PT still alive in the line. Zero time or need to rehash Episode VII sets when there are dozens of things to make for Rogue One and the Han Solo movie and Episode VIII and Episode IX... Don't think you will get a chance to score a better version in a few years. It ain't happening.

Honestly I'm more anticipating Constraction Wave 3 (whatever we get in the summer/fall 2016) from the classic movies (assuming it won't have more TFA since W2 will more than cover that). Having pored over the reviews of the W1 Constractions, I've definitely come to the conclusion that fleshy heads are not worth attempting for these figures - at least not in the realistic style. The CW Obi-wan looks great because they use that CW stylization, the Luke looks weird and porcelain. For W3, I have two lists - what I'd like to see and what I think we'll actually see: What I think we'll get: -OT-era Imperial trooper. It almost seems putting the cart before the horse to be getting a TFA stormie before any generic trooper from the existing saga, so I can't see another wave of Constractions passing by without this coming to bear. I don't think this will be another unique clone like Cody, that already seemed an odd choice, and there's just more money to be made in going generic: you can guarantee that many collectors will snap up half a dozen or more of this sort of thing for displays. All the good money says this would be a normal Stormtrooper, but that would mean consecutive white trooper characters with different helmets and no other variation of significance - big no-no for Lego, I think. I think the smarter money is on something like a TIE Pilot, Death Star Gunner, or Scout Trooper (the latter being an ironic echo of how Scout Troopers were prioritized over traditional Stormies for two goddamn years in the original Lego SW line). -Darth Maul. Why Maul? Doesn't seem like an obvious choice at first, but a moment's consideration reveals it absolutely is. Maul has inhuman coloration which dodges the uncanny valley issue, and is guaranteed to look cool. He wears simple black gear so it's not much in the way of new parts. And a double-bladed lightsaber is the logical next step for Constraction: after W1 and W2, we'll have single saber characters, the four-saber grievous, and Kylo with his crossguard saber. Next up has to be the iconic doublesaber. -Clone Wars Anakin. It's the logical followup to Obi-wan, the Clone Wars look suits the Constractions, kids love Anakin, and his armored style from the early part of the show on which they're basing the figure will work great. -Super Battle Droid. Big, bulky, massive torso - the thing is designed to be a toy and that suits Constraction. It seems more likely to me than a basic battle droid since they'd be so shrimpy and skeletal. -Han Solo. I don't think he belongs in Constraction, but Han is a super-popular character and I just don't see him being passed over. A lot easier to do than Chewbacca too. -Boba Fett. His rougher aesthetic will make him harder to pull off than Jango, but already people are crying, "why Jango?" They will definitely make Boba. What I'd love for W3 Constraction: -501st Clone Trooper Phase II. Visually pops, fan-beloved legion, strong reason to collect multiples. -Imperial Guard. The Emperor's Guard would be perfect as a Constraction - cloth for his robes can mask a simple but poseable basic skeleton with light armoring and minimal detail, and you get a bright, dynamic figure with that awesome helmet and killer red vibe. Another figure with potential to purchase multiples. -Pre Viszla. Heresy, some will say, to have another Mando before Boba. But IMO Constraction is all about which characters best fit the medium, and Pre Viszla was born for Constraction. Mando armor like Jango, lots of gadgets, a small cape that could reuse what cape cut they make for Kylo, and most importantly, that darksaber. I wouldn't expect Lego to do anything more than a black-colored lightsaber, but that'd still be really cool. -IG-88. There just aren't a lot of good IG-88's out there in any medium, and he's never been done right as a Lego figure. But Constraction would fit him superbly. He's lanky, he's robotic, he's got a cool head, lots of guns - all the elements are there. And it'd really fill a niche that has yet to be filled - adult collectors would see that be like, sweet, I want that on my desk (the appeal of the Grievous fig but for the OT), and kids of course would eat it up, he's a robot with guns whose variations show up all over the Clone Wars. -Kanan Jarrus. Another character born for Constraction. He's lightly armored, he's from animation so the translation to Constraction would be easy, he's got a gun AND a lightsaber. Rebels deserves a couple slots in Constraction. -The Inquisitor. Even more perfect for Constraction than Kanan - armored but lithe and lanky, got a unique lightsaber to appeal to the kids, and he's a worthy followup to a Vader figure. It also splits the wave perfectly between PT, OT, and Rebels.

One other improvement I made immediately - the landing ramp is held by a blue half/half pin and a loose grey pin. This makes the action feature of slamming the ramp down work, but I've found swooshing the ship around or even shaking it a bit will cause the ramp to flop open. I replace the grey loose pin with a common black pressure pin from the extra pieces and this solves the issue while retaining full function of the landing ramp.

I quite like the Sep Lander from your other post. This one feels a bit underdone - the grey slopes that make up the bulk of the top part of the model's distinctive shape feel rather exposed and unfinished. The command bridge has solid greebling though.