Subject:
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Set 10030 ("Imperial Star Destroyer") re-release comments
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.general
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Date:
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Sun, 7 Aug 2005 20:33:51 GMT
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Viewed:
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1593 times
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Forgive me if this is a rehash of what was said three years ago when the
original run of the set made its debut, but being as I was 17 then and I didn't
have a job that paid well enough to feed my Lego addiction (or any job at all)
at the time, I'm sure you'll understand.
I'd been meaning to save up to purchase this set for a while now, but when
Friday's paycheck rolled around and I did the math for my bills, I wound up with
a $300 surplus, so I quickly drove down to the Lego store in Orlando to buy it.
My main rationale was that for Christmas '96 my folks bought for me set 8480,
Space Shuttle / "FOS Light" Space Shuttle, and at the age of eleven it took me
some four days to put together, so now at the age of twenty I wanted something
that would take me more than an evening to put together. Back to the story at
hand - the Lego store was hopping as usual, and the cashier was even kind enough
to go into the stock room and grab one that was still in its cardboard shipping
box, so it would be totally pristine and unfettered. As I lugged it out to my
car, the first thing that I noticed was how unusually heavy the box was - from
the sheer weight alone, this was going to be one heck of a set.
Once I drove this beast home, I carefully cut open the cardboard shipping
box and slid out the set box itself. After about five to ten minutes of simply
staring at it in awe, hugging myself, grinning like a madman, and giggling like
a schoolgirl, I carefully cut open the box and revealed... four more boxes and a
manual! Undeterred, I cut open these four more boxes, unbagged all of the
parts, and sat back, floored, at the magnitude of the project before me.
Granted, 3,104 pieces may not be much to the sort of Lego maniac who regularly
builds his own person-sized statues, but for those of us whose largest Lego
purchase in the past few months had all of about 1,000 pieces, it seems huge.
To cut a long story short, building this set took me all of perhaps twelve
to sixteen hours (total) of build time. I liked the fact that this was still
longer than an evening, but I was hoping that it would take me upwards of four
days of off-and-on building. This leads me to theorize that what Lego need to
produce is some sort of "Ultra Hardcore" series with upwards of 6,000 pieces.
None of this 16+ rubbish, I want to see a set plainly labelled as 18+ or even
20+. I know that I'd certainly buy it. At any rate, the assembled set was a
sight to behold. The statistic of three feet long by two feet wide, when given
verbally, does not suitably impress upon the reader how large it truly is. When
set upon the top of my filing cabinet in my cubicle at work, it still hangs a
good foot off the edge. When it was set up on my coffee table, it took up all
of the available real estate.
Now for the bad news: The set is WAY TOO FLIMSY. For those of you who have
not seen or built this set, let me explain the general layout of the set - you
have a sort of A-frame built out of a large amount of 1x16 Technic Bricks for
the main body of the craft, and that's all. The underside and the upperside are
wafer-thin panels made out of large plates barely held together with 2xN plates,
held onto the frame by all of four (for the underside) or three (for the
upperside) magnets and three 2x2 patches. That is -it-. There is no easy way
to hold the model, as it is this hulking behemoth, and pretty much every square
inch of purchase will buckle or bend if you attempt to carry the model and are
touching it. In carrying the finished model to my car so I could take it to
work, I had to fetch one part that fell off onto the pavement, and I had to fix
one of the lower panels which had buckled while carrying it. In the
quarter-mile drive to work, the model tipped onto its side, quite effectively
breaking off the spindly stand-type legs that hold it up, and causing both of
the lower -and- upper panels to buckle. I spent 30 minutes sitting in the back
of my car fixing it, and when crossing the main lobby of my place of employment,
one of the lower panels decided to simply fall off and shatter on the floor,
leading me to have to set the model down, go home, get the manual, and spend ten
minutes fixing the model right there on the floor. I would go so far as to say
that the only advantageous thing about this model for transporting it is that
the main decks that project out of the top of the Star Destroyer are simply set
in place, so you can easily lift them up and carry them separately.
Long story short (too late), the set is fun to build, and it looks stunning
when it's finished, but you'd better finish it wherever you intend to display
it, because it will start to fall apart if you look at it wrong. I only hope
that the Death Star model that's coming out in September doesn't have these
issues, as I plan on buying it as well.
Final judgement:
+ Looks absolutely amazing when finished
+ C'mon, it's Star Wars
+ Is fun to build
+ Comes with a fun informational decal with Imperial Star Destroyer statistics
+ Comes with another small model for a scale reference
- Far too fragile
- Still doesn't take very long to build for an advanced builder, so the fun of
building is short-lived.
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