LEGO senior designer Henrik Andersen is taking the covers off of the newly announced 75252 Imperial Star Destroyer… quite literally. In the designer video posted by LEGO, he shows off the Technic core and backbone of the ship and shares some interesting facts about the model.
He says that a LEGO Star Wars model has never had such an extensive Technic structure before, and that he tried to make the inside as colorful as possible since the outside is primarily grey. Henrik also used both digital design software and physical mock-ups to create the set, commenting that “it’s not a super hard build, it’s just a big build.”
Henrik also views designing sets with only existing LEGO elements as a creative challenge, hence no new elements will be included in the Star Destroyer, though he mentions there will be several elements in grey that have never been made in that color before (no surprise there!).
The designer also revealed that the set will come with a microscale TIE Fighter, a small detail previously unknown about the set and not pictured in product photos or the press release.
Check out the whole video for yourselves to learn even more about the new LEGO Star Wars UCS Imperial Star Destroyer:
Nice article, thx :D
Although that the TIE is even notable on the blurred leaked images of yesterday, and unmissable on the high-res images of today. So, new info? No, not at all.
But the rest of the info from Henrik was really nice :D
“He says that a LEGO Star Wars model has never had such an extensive Technic structure before…”
Well, if you remember, the first attempt at this had a tendency to develop a Roman nose if it was displayed too long, because of how much weight was cantilevered off the single display stand. The only trick anyone figured out for how to take the bow out of the Technic bricks was to rebuilt it with them upside down and let physics do its thing. For preventative measures, there were fan-developed nose-stands, and I think an official design was even posted just to split some of the load. So, _hopefully_ they’ve had plenty of time to test this for long-term structural integrity and came up with a design that’s not going to repeat that problem.
Then again, I’ve noticed the mandibles on my original UCS MF are a bit droopy (it didn’t help that I parked the midi-scale MF on one of them…), so maybe there’s just a hard limit on how much they can do to prevent that.