The dark side of the brick

I'm still struggling away with the Technic crane - onto night three and I'm still only half way through the manual!  I'm therefore spending an hour or so on other builds first and today's was the latest General Greivous' starfighter (I can't bring myself to add the superfluous s) - set 75286 .   I was all set to dislike this, given the price (I refused to pay the full asking fee and got this one 30% off in a sale).  However, I found myself quite taken, partly because it gave me a new piece (the 8x2 curved slope) and several other fairly rare ones.  It's also pretty weighty for its size. Nevertheless, it does remain very expensive for what it is and as such remains pretty average in the grand scheme. Back to technic! 

I'm back into picking bricks from the store for the next 8 builds so limited building going on.  However, I did give myself a break yesterday and cleaned / built the copy of Ahsoka's starfighter ( 7751 ) I picked up from Ebay.  This arrived filthy dirty but after an hour over the utility room sink, what emerged was a near pristine set of bricks with stickers generally well applied.  It was missing a few parts, most of which I had spare in my collection - just a pair of droid legs to pick up on a future Bricklink order.  Oh and it was missing the instructions but I managed to get hold of the only set of these on Bricklink!  The set comes with a vulture droid and two buzz droids, as well as a relatively common Ahsoka minifig and a unique R7-A7 droid.  The starfighter is pretty standard in its overall shape though has an interesting mechanism underneath for firing the missiles (until I finished the wings I wasn't sure what this did!).  There are a couple ...