LEGO explains why the new Republic Gunship is smaller than its predecessors

The LEGO Star Wars team has explained why the latest minifigure-scale Republic Gunship is smaller than its predecessors.

This year’s 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship marks a major departure from previous Republic Gunships in more ways than one. The obvious distinction is in its unique colour scheme, but place it side by side with 75021 Republic Gunship, 7676 Republic Gunship and 7163 Republic Gunship, and the bigger difference is actually its size: the new set is far more compact than those that have come before.

For the LEGO Star Wars designers responsible for bringing the first minifigure-scale gunship in 10 years to shelves, the shift in size was a simple consequence of changing priorities among the team. While they were clearly content to churn out earlier gunships at a size perhaps a touch too big for young kids to easily fly around the room, the focus for 75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship was squarely on making it playable.

“First of all, a model like [75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship] should be swooshable,” LEGO Star Wars Creative Lead Jens Kronvold Frederiksen tells Brick Fanatics and other LEGO Fan Media. “So stability and playability [are] really, really important to the model, and that’s often the challenge with these bigger models. But here, with that size, it is actually also a very stable model that can be handled. So that was really the deciding factor on the size of it.”

There are certain compromises that inevitably come with such a sweeping change in approach, and again they’re best highlighted by comparing the dark red gunship to its more traditionally white contemporaries. The newer set swaps out the split doors of previous gunships for a single, sturdier door, for example. But the designers see these changes as improvements – at least with respect to their aims for this particular set.

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“I think in general we are always trying to improve from a previous model,” Jens adds. “We really go through all consumer feedback, both good and bad. And if it’s good things, then we are of course keeping it; if it’s not so good things, then we are trying to improve them. So that’s always a really, really important part when we are designing something that has existed before in LEGO, and definitely the case also with the gunship.

“We know something like the handle is really something that’s appreciated. I’ve also seen online, that there are some [people who] have changed the doors, because technically the doors should have been double. But it just didn’t work. It was way too fragile. So we decided, hey, we’ll go with the standard doors. And it gives much easier access to the interior where we thought it’s important that you can place minifigures inside. So that was a small compromise on the design, because we wanted this to be a very good toy.”

If it’s a bigger LAAT/i you’re after, there’s always 75309 Republic Gunship, which blows the iconic Clone Wars vehicle up to Ultimate Collector Series scale. It is retiring soon, though, and is also way beyond compatibility with minifigures. To land somewhere between the two currently-available troop transports, you’ll have to turn once again to older sets on the aftermarket – or get creative with the latest version…

75354 Coruscant Guard Gunship is available now. Hear more from the LEGO Star Wars designers on how this set came to life by hitting play on the video below or heading to our YouTube channel.

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