LEGO Star Wars UCS Death Star designer reveals his only regret
The designer behind LEGO Star Wars 75419 Death Star has revealed the one function that proved too much of a headache to include in the towering battle station.
Running straight up through the fully armed and operational battle station, from top to bottom, is a working turbolift elevator. It’s not the speediest thing – here’s hoping the Emperor doesn’t need to make an emergency trip to the detention block from his throne room, because he’s not getting there this side of Life Day – but it does the job, carrying forward a function from the original 10188 Death Star.
For designer César Soares, it proved to be the most complex and challenging part of the set to figure out. “The elevator was getting stuck,” he told Brick Fanatics and other LEGO fan media in a recent roundtable interview. “I thought I would find a solution, and then I would ask somebody else to come, and that person was trying to activate it, and it would get stuck.
“Maybe it was the velocity, I don’t know, but there were so many iterations, and in the end, the solution was to have all the walls of the elevator – like the big wall elements, with the smooth surface – facing the shaft. And the most important part was actually having the elevator cabin have a round shape on the edges so it doesn’t get caught. But, yeah, it was the biggest challenge by far.”
If getting the elevator working in the first place was complicated, it was at least achievable. The same couldn’t be said for every aspect of the design. “The only thing that I pursued for a little bit, but quickly realised would be a big headache, was that I would really like to have had some kind of way of opening the doors as the elevator went through the floors,” César added, revealing his only real regret in the design process. “But that was very, very challenging, so I gave up on that.”
Dimitri (who recorded his footage before this roundtable took place) suggested exactly that function in our video review of 75419 Death Star, and it would certainly have elevated (sorry not sorry) the 9,023-piece set. But its absence isn’t really on the same level as the compromises seen elsewhere in the $1,000 model – such as its minifigures – and the space station otherwise includes pretty much every room you’d expect from across A New Hope and Return of the Jedi.
“I don’t think there was anything that we were like, ‘Oh, I wish I had room for that.’ No, pretty much everything is here from both movies,” César said, before pointing out there’s even one room you probably don’t remember aboard the Death Star. “I actually have Darth Vader’s meditation chamber, which you don’t see in any of the movies, unless you watch the deleted scenes. But it looks pretty cool, and it would make sense for Darth Vader to have one on a Death Star anyway.”
You can check out every room in 75419 Death Star up close in our in-depth written and video reviews of the October release. It will be available from October 1 at LEGO.com and in LEGO Stores for £899.99 / $999.99 / €999.99, becoming the most expensive LEGO set of all time.
Read more…
- LEGO offers up reasons why 75419 Death Star isn’t a sphere
- How not to display the $1,000 LEGO Star Wars Death Star
- LEGO explains why the Death Star isn’t a Master Builder Series set
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