Outrider? This name may not mean anything to you, but you have surely heard it somewhere ... This ship, belonging to Dash Rendar, a smuggler, a sort of video-game version of Han Solo seen in video games Shadows of the Empire et Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance, is a much less well-known craft than the Millennium Falcon.

Made, like its cousin the Millennium Falcon, by the Corellian Engineering Corporation, this ship is a modified and heavily armed version of the YT-2400 Light Freighter.

Dash Rendar, who studied atImperial Academy with Han Solo still refused to officially join the rebellion but nevertheless participated in the Battle of Hoth alongside members of the Rogue squadron.

LEGO came up with an honest take on this Outrider as an alternative model of the set. 6211 Imperial Star Destroyer released in 2006 which also offered an alternative model of the T-16 Skyhopper. I also offer you the instructions for download in pdf format directly on Hoth Bricks for these two models, so you will avoid looking for them in the shallows of the internet if you want to assemble these ships with the parts of your ISD:

6211 Imperial Star destroyer Alternate Model: Outrider (6 MB)
6211 Imperial Star destroyer Alternate Model: T-16 Skyhopper (5 MB)

Nannan Zhang also offered a very successful version of this vessel with this model in Midi-Scale format designed from the parts of the set 7778 Mid-scale Millennium Falcon released in 2009, proof if any of the family link between the two devices ...

For the record, this ship makes a (very) brief appearance in theEpisode IV: A New Hope (Special Edition). We see him leave Mos Eisley, which nevertheless gives him a canonical value beyond his first appearances in the video games of the franchise.

LEGO having so far confined itself to the canonical Star Wars universe, with some more or less happy forays into the Extended Universe and now into the Star Wars The Old Republic video game, why not release this ship in the form of a System set? After all, we've had so many versions of the Millennium Falcon that this Outrider would be welcome ...

Bruce alias Brick Tales, cumulates blogs and you certainly already know Comicbricks, or MicroBricks, two blogs that he runs daily with many MOCs, customs, news, etc ...

So he launches TolkienBricks, blog dedicated to the world of Lord of the Rings, and you will find many MOCs, recent or not, as well as news on the next LEGO LOTR & The Hobbit range.

If you have a few minutes, be sure to check out his LEGO version of LOTR, there are some beautiful, nicely reconstructed scenes.

My Avengers team is growing little by little with Captain America who has just joined the Hulk and Iron Man ... The three minifigs are the work of Christo, and Captain America is really superb. The shield is silver, and the minifigure is perfectly screen printed.

LEGO must release its official version of Captain America in the LEGO Super Heroes Marvel range by mid 2012. A prototype of the minifig was also presented at San Diego Comic Con in July 2011.

The shield is covered with a sticker on this prototype, but it should be screen-printed in the final version, or in any case it would be better if it is, otherwise, the community risks crying scandal ....

Two new mini sets have appeared: This is the 30056 Star Destroyer et 30058 STAP. Little information about them, nothing in particular concerning the mode of distribution of these mini sets which will undoubtedly have to be bought on Bricklink for a few tens of dollars.

We already have a Star Destroyer in mini format in the Star Wars range with the set 4492 released in 2004 and whose design seems to me a bit more successful than this one ...
We have also been entitled in the past to a Battle Droid is EPPS with the set 30004 released in 2009.

Nothing very innovative then, but if like me you like minis, you are probably already checking on Bricklink if they are already referenced ... and they are: 30056 Star Destroyer & 30058 STAP. No seller is yet offering them for sale. Wait & see ...

We had already had a vague intuition on this subject: The new version of C-3PO suffers from some serigraphy problems. On the different visuals of this minifigure that we have seen so far, we had the weird impression that C-3PO, just crashed on Tatooine with R2-D2, was looking elsewhere ...

This is due to the new serigraphy of the eyes of this minifigure, which on some copies is very far from being centered unlike the one presented above by Huw Millington on Brickset (with beautiful photos to see in his flickr gallery). And this variation in impressions is not an isolated case. Many AFOLs already report burrs and other offsets on the serigraphs of minifigs in the Super Heroes range.

In the past, screen prints were not always perfect, but it seems that these problems are more and more present. We have all had in our hands a minifigure that is poorly screened or whose printing is slightly offset with an overlap of colors. Nothing serious in itself. But on C-3PO, this shift induces a completely different facial expression than the minifig. And I find it all of a sudden becomes much more awkward ....

I put below an example of a minifigure whose gaze is completely distorted by this shift, admit that it is very average ...