Republic Gunships

My pace of posting has massively slowed down since the first half of the year... though taking Lego apart and putting it in plastic bags isn't anywhere near as exciting to talk about as building it is.  This week, however, I've gone back to building - not that I have anywhere to put my new build it turns out.  My house is in disarray as I have new windows fitted in most rooms and my nephews are coming to stay next week which will cause further havoc.  Hmm.

Anyway, my build for the week was the much delayed UCS republic gunship (75309).  I've not rushed it but it has taken me 4 nights of building and turns out to be 3292 bricks of typical incredibleness.  I really like all of the proper UCS sets and this is no exception.  

 

The set is massive - it certainly compares to the ISDs and Falcons in terms of sheer scale.  Here's another photo with the old minifig scale gunships for comparison:

It's also nicely designed with a robust feel and largely SNOT design.  That said, I could have a couple of niggles: firstly, the level of detail is perhaps slightly below that of recent UCS sets, reflected in the number of parts for the size.  Secondly, I have no idea why they decided to go for square fronts to the main guns!  

So, while I really like it, I don't love it.  8 out of 10.  Here's a few more photos:



While I've got the older gunships out, I thought I'd rank them... not sure I've ever had all three out at once.  Firstly, way back in 2002, we had 7163, weighing in at only 697 bricks. With that, it packs in a stupendous amount of detail and playability.  You get the swing-out gun pods and the whole front opens up.  This set also came with the infamous Jedi Bob.

Next up in 2008 was 7676. This shares quite a few of the design features but has doors that open all over the place with a little command skimmer and a speeder bike tucked away inside.  

Finally, in 2013 came 75021 which has the fractionally the most parts of the three and a hybrid of the play features. You get the side gun pods from 7163 but the speeder bike in the back and opening side doors from 7676.  That said, this one is my least favourite.

If forced to choose, I'd go all the way back to 7163 as my top pick!



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, though, you've got to
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, really - I regularly
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 bases which a
Read more