This was my first large lego set to build. It took about an hour and a half to construct. It comes with 1 minifigure - a clone pilot. I think the ship looks cool and sleek - like a Star Wars fighter plane should look. The translucent blue heads on the torpedoes make them look more realistic. They don't shoot very far, but it's still an interesting decoration on the ship. My favorite part about the ship is it's folding wings which brings me to the main point of my review.
When I first built this ship the left and right wings would not fold all the way up when in landing mode. In flying mode the center wing would not go all the way down. It felt like there was resistance and it was catching on something. After reading several other reviews, message boards, etc I realized I was not the only one with wing problems. The instructions are not that clear when assembling the land gear and it's easy to make mistakes. Since this is the coolest feature of the ship, you want to make sure it's working properly. Here are some things that you may want to check if you are having wing problems or landing gear problems:
1. When you are assembling the landing gear, check to make sure the gears are in at the right angle. Step 15 of the instructions direct you to keep the little gear (that works the landing gear) out and unengaged until page 13 of book 2. I recommend you keep them in when you are building the landing gear so that you can test them whenever you want and make sure they are functioning properly. You want to make sure the parts of the landing gear are not jamming into each other when folding up or down. It's much easier to make changes at this stage than to do it after you have finished building the entire ship.
2. Make sure your pistons are not on backwards.
3. Make sure your pistons are pushed in all the way in before you attach the engines.
4. Your landing gear needs to be out (not retracted) the entire time you are assembling the engines and the wings. (I didn't run into this issue, but when reading other message boards it seems to be a fairly common error)
I hope this will help any of you who run into wing problems. Happy building to you all!













