Subject:
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First Impressions of #7150 - TIE Fighter / Y-Wing
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.starwars, lugnet.reviews
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Date:
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Tue, 9 Mar 1999 16:18:41 GMT
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Viewed:
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961 times
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OK. I opened the box, I built the models, and here's what I thought
about it:
The Packaging: quite different from other LEGO sets. I think the box
was designed by someone who pays more attention to marketing than most
TLG designers. It's a slicker presentation. Inside, there's less
cardboard than in other LEGO sets. No internal dividers at all, no
plastic tray (why should there be -- no display windows in the box),
just a plain cardboard tray and the decorative card-stock wrapper-box.
There was a mix of holey bags and plain-plastic bags.
The Pieces: mostly black, dark gray, and gray, with some white, yellow,
blue and red. A lot of colors for two mostly-dark ships. There seems
to be a high number of imperfections on the parts, both from molding and
from shipping. My R5-D4 head was marred by black ink on the stud. :(
While there are a lot of special pieces, they are used most
strategically, and I think the overall ratio of special pieces to
regular pieces is very low. Lots of bricks, plates, tiles, and slopes.
And a lot of the special pieces are regular LEGO special pieces that a
lot of people will be happy to see. Other than the droid, minifigs and
a few expected decorated parts, the new pieces are:
- a large number of the new stepping hinge bricks
- the Y-Wing canopy
- the TIE canopy
- the connector between the TIE panels and arms. Imagine a 4x4 brick
with a 2x2x2 inverted convex corner slope on each corner.
Of these, the only real SPUD (single-purpose, ugly decorative) piece is
the front canopy from the TIE fighter.
I expect that we'll see some serious parts auctions based on these sets,
especially if the collector and scalper markets are saturated before all
sets are sold out of retail.
The Instructions: they look very cool, they tie into the overall
packaging quite well. The small pics from the movies on each page is
quite nice (but I'm getting old enough to want bright light and a
magnifying glass). The steps are very simple, just a few pieces each.
The instructions could have been compressed into a lot fewer steps, but
that's pretty standard for LEGO (I'm still getting over building the
Technic space shuttle, so I've currently got an expectation for
higher-complexity instructions).
There are one or two errors in the instructions, the biggest is they
show Vader's head as yellow instead of grey. This guy looks basically
like Victor Von Doom (hasn't that always been true of Vader?) after he
got the first scar. Nice bags under his eyes.
The Ships: These things are bigger than I realized they'd be,
especially the TIE fighter. Which is pretty cool. Most LEGO sets I get,
the models turn out not as big as I thought they'd be. The ships are
not as big as they should be to be 'to scale', but so what? I'm mostly
very happy with these ships (and this set), althoug most of what follows
seems to be grumbling.
The TIE fighter seems chunky -- the arms and panels should have been
thinner (I know, that's hard to do in LEGO). I think TLG/LF(I?) chose
playability over accuracy, because the panels are held on with Technic
pegs, which would have been hard to do if the arms were thin, and the
trailing 'wing' surface made as thin as a plate. I assume the pegs are
used so kids can pop the panels off when Darth crashes his ship. I'm OK
with that, except is makes the TIE fighter somewhat rattle-y. The TIE
will come apart into 6 snap-together pieces.
The interior of the TIE isn't so great on detail. There's a single,
free-standing 1x2 column with a tile-panel on top. When Vader sits in
the pilot's 'seat', his head is almost at the top of the compartment,
and set way back so he's actually behind the center-point of the side
arms. I expected him to be positioned centered on the porthole, right
in the front.
I'm not sure why there's so much blue on the TIE fighter -- I don't
remember any in the movies. Ditto on the dark gray.
Compared to the TIE Fighter, the Y-Wing is definitely too small. Just
the delta-shaped cockpit section should be as massive as the TIE's pilot
module, but it isn't (at least partly because the TIE is too massive).
Wasn't the Y-Wing originally a two-seater? The two big problems with
this model: the top guns rotate, but they don't elevate (no
hinge-plates, just a 2x2 turntable for the base). And the pilot has to
basically lie down to fit (wasn't the Y-Wing originally a two-seater?).
A secondary problem is that the bottom is entirely flat. It looks like
the landing gear (standard 2x2x2 round space pads) were stuck on pretty
late in the design cycle. To fix the pilot's head-space problem, and
make the bottom more accurate, they should have put a couple of layers
of plates on the bottom of the cockpit.
I like all the storage areas they've put on the Y-Wing. Probably not
prototypical, but what the heck. There's a removable mailbox element,
with Alliance graphics on the door, and a opening storage space at the
fork of the Y.
Alternate models: these things are somewhere between really cool and
really goofy-looking, but they are *there* (a change from many recent
LEGO sets), and they are more than just one or two thrown-together
pieces of junk (a change from the rest of the recent LEGO sets). There
are multiple views of each alternate model, which can only encourage
kids to try building them.
Bottom line: these things look really cool sitting on top of my
monitor, but they are not the ultimate Star Wars designs. Lots of room
for fiddling and fixing by the lucky owner. Which is actually a good
thing. If TLG produced perfect models, all we'd do is put them together
and admire (which I do enough of anyway). The set has lots of good
parts to modify the ships, or create something completely different.
Steve
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