Imperial Shuttles

I'm about to start deconstruction of my collection of Imperial shuttles.  I'm sad about this because the UCS shuttle (10212) is one of my all-time favourite Lego sets.  However, it is very big and it was taking up space where I wanted to put my new collection of storage boxes, so it'll have to go.

The imperial shuttle recurs quite regularly throughout the Lego catalogue.  Apart from the simply enormous UCS set, there are, I think 4 minifig-sized play sets:

  • 7166 from way back in 2001
  • 7264 from 2005, which is basically a copy of 7166 (with the new colours) and more minifigs
  • 75094 from 2015
  • and 75302 from earlier this year.

Here's a photo of 3 of them (Imperial Inspection was on the floor):

Of these, I have a soft spot for the 2001 original but would go for 75094 if I had to pick one - the most bricks, the best play features and the biggest at this size.  There are no less than 5 mini sets, though for some reason I could only find 4 of these.  4494 from way back in 2004 is my favourite of these, mainly for the printed cockpit.

But back to the UCS version: this is one of my rebuild efforts as I failed to buy it when it was in the shops.  However, I managed mostly new bricks and managed to do it reasonably cost-effectively.  All minifigs are now present but it took a while on those.  


 Why do I like it so much?  The largely SNOT design is really sleek, with a beautifully realised cockpit even the collar back to the body is really nicely done.  There is well-realised detail throughout (e.g. at the back where you wouldn't necessarily look for it).  The wings are awesome and the way they fold down is very cool.  So, all in all, a top set.






Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Star Wars M&M Mosaic

Image
A few weeks back, I was trawling through Rebrickable, checking which Star Wars sets I hadn't build up and I came across two promo sets that I'd not found before.  The first was the "Han Solo on his Tauntaun" that I built up a week or so back and documented here .  The other was the altogether more crazy Star Wars M&M promo mosaic ( SWMP ) which rocks in 5462 pieces, according to Rebrickable.   It's debatable whether this really a released set, as only 400 were made that they were never available to the general public.  Apparently, it was a Walmart promotion event, held in different locations across the US and you could build these over 48 hours.   The set is massive - it covers 6 48x48 base plates so is around 76x115cm (2.5x3.75ft for those who work in imperial).  However, the whole thing distils to just 4 plate sizes (1x1, 1x2, 1x4 and 2x4), plus 169 2x2 black tiles.  And there are only 9 colours too.  Before you can start building,...
Read more

Lego Colours

Image
Thanks to my mother and grandfather, I am colourblind. After discovering (c. 2001) that I knew all of the PhD students and postdocs in the colour vision team at Cambridge, I allowed them to experiment on me and was duly diagnosed as extreme deuteranomalous vision defective.  Putting aside the science, this means I have very limited ability to distinguish blue from purple, as well as struggling with red/brown and green/brown (oddly, I'm almost always fine with red/green).   Why am I writing about this in a Lego blog?  The answer should be obvious in that there are times when I really struggle to identify what colour my bricks are.  Particular challenges are: Dark red vs. reddish brown (this is my all-time worst and I struggle with them every time) Dark green vs. dark brown (especially cheese slopes) Transparent yellow vs transparent bright green (this is another random weakness which totally foxed Petroc when he tested me 20 years ago) Dark green vs. black (yes, ...
Read more

Han Solo on his Tauntaun

Image
I've not done very much building in recent days - I've instead been focussed on a couple of super-rare promo sets.  The first is the Star Wars / M&M Mosaic which I now have all the parts for but realised that there are no building instructions out there.  So I'm painstakingly creating my own in LeoCad - will post a link once I've finished them so others may follow in the footsteps of the Sith M&M.   However, I did mostly build one of them today - the super-rare Han Solo on his Tauntaun ( LLCA53 ) which I've rebuilt from spares and Bricklink.  I struggled to find any build instructions until I came across this post, which gives chapter and verse on the set... so I'm just going to post a photo.   I'm missing a piece (on order from Bricklink) and I replaced two of the reddish brown plates with clips with dark red equivalents.  The jumpers are also modern equivalents and I switched the turntables that top the legs with black rather than LBG ba...
Read more