Nebulon B!

Today I'm pretty excited... the final parts arrived for my rebuild of the Nebulon B medical frigate (77904). This is a first outing for Lego for one of the classic ships from the original trilogy - after more than 20 years!  It's taken me a few months to collect all the parts - some of them are pretty rare but it was cheaper than buying a new copy of this from Ebay.  I think this was briefly available off Amazon last year, after an intended release at an Expo.  BNISB versions are going for about £120 - if I can pick up a copy for less than £50, I may do so but it's not high on the list.


Why am I excited?  This ship is a key part of my journey back into Lego.  After discovering Bricklink and realising that I had a chance to rebuild the 2007 UCS Falcon, my next step was discovering the infinite universe of MOCs.  I thought about odd Star Wars ships which hadn't been released as sets and alighted on the Nebulon B.  I then went looking for photo references and stumbled across Mortsev's version and gave up any intention of trying to out-do this amazing set.  As soon as the instructions appeared on Rebrickable, I set about buying the parts and then building.

 

 

It took weeks to build and looks amazing - the level of detail is incredible and it's an amazing recreation of the source material.  The only downside was that it was incredibly fragile - I spend hours rebuilding it several times after accidentally knocking bits off and after moving it from this location next to my dining table (the wife: "...but it's in the way!"), it fell somewhat catastrophically apart and I never really rebuilt it properly again. 

So when I saw this official Lego set, I knew I needed to build it (well, even more than I want to build all of the Lego Star Wars sets).  The build weighs in at 458 pieces in some 115 separate lots.  You start with the central axis and go on to build the front section, minus some of the more fragile parts of the exterior (though the cone and bar tucked at the rear of the front section that went on came back off every 2 mins):

 



I love the variety of detailing and the reasonable amount of asymmetry.  The next stage does the rear section:

The angles really work well and the level of detail is maintained.  Finally, the two halves are connected and the stand built.  The comms antennas and hull plates at the front, plus the smallest ever Falcon complete the set.



Overall, I love it!  It's not huge - just over 12 inches long - but packs an huge amount of detail.  The overall dimensions look pretty close to film accurate.  The stand is a thing of beauty.  The only potential area for improvement was that the film version appeared to have more colour in it, especially in the sections down the wing at the front.  I also think that the curved front sections could have been done in DBG to be a bit more accurate, but I think this is all based on a single photo of the original model.  That said, I'm carping over a model that is, in my view, really cool.


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