Block MOC review – Empire over Jedha

When I first caught glimpse of this MOC, long before the Chinese block-off community grabbed it, I was taken aback.

It is rare to see a set like this. Something on a micro scale, yet so incredibly detailed. With hundreds of small buildings peeking out under the massive Star Destroyer. It was something of beauty, and something I figured I would never have a chance to build, as the likelihood of me putting in the time to collect the bricks for this was pretty unlikely.

But thankfully, the “Lepin” community rose to the challenge, and popped this set out.

Coming in at a whopping 5098 bricks, it is no small feat to put this thing together.

Sorting of MOCs is always a challenge, and I tend to not stray too far from how it is bagged. In my experience, bricks of a like step or kind tend to be together. Not always, but short of sorting every little brick, this is what I have found that works.

Sadly one thing that came immediately apparent was, they decided to change the color of the interior “unseen” bricks. Now this is not an issue IF, and this is a big one, IF you let people know what you changed….

What it made for was a terribly frustrating build as you had to literally guess what bricks would not be needed later. The substituted Red for Blue, but also put in a pile of light grey and dark grey, both of which are used in other parts of the build.

So when assembling the base, hundreds of substitutions were made, and worse yet, the manual is pretty unclear on colors specification. Sometimes things looked red, other times orange, and the 2 greys are almost identical in the book, so finding the right parts was a real challenge.

All that said, the base is incredibly well designed. It is solid and shows very little change of falling part at all.

The detail level is incredible, with multiple layers of “dirt” layer after layer.

Once the base was out of the way, the city level posed the next conundrum. The instructions on how the support posts inside are placed leaves a lot of guess work as well. So when you are coming around the structure later with the walls, you may run into instances where you have to take some of it apart, and move the columns as they are in the wrong place.

Another major shortcoming was the lack of properly colored supports for the star Destroyer. They provided white, and they should have been clear, this was to give it that floating look, which was completely ruined by 2 giant white technic sticks….

Worse yet is the fact that they are built right into the base and into the Star Destroyer, so if you decide to change them later, you will need to do a substantial amount of rebuilding. So mu suggestion is grab a pair of bricklink BEFORE you begin.

And while you are there, grab a set of clear sticks for the mini ship supports too, those are inconveniently white as well.

Lastly we have the Star Destroyer itself.

For a ship that is so “small” it is incredibly well details, but sadly, it is also incredibly poorly designed.

The top and bottom plates will not stay in place and closed along the seams at all.

I tried multiple redesigns in hopes to fix the flaws, but in the end was only able to find one fix… Kragle…

That is par for the course for MOC builds usually, but I still hate to break it out if I can avoid it.

The command deck as well was areal pain to assemble. From the instructions being a bit vague at points, to finding a delicate placement of things to make them look right. It was just a pain to assemble.

Luckily it required no glue to make work.

All in all, it is on par with MOC builds. It looks fantastic finished, but it is a royal pain in the ass to get there.

Definitely a 8/10 on the complexity scale. And only recommended for the seasoned MOC builder.

One of the coolest looking sets in my collection though, and I do still recommend it no matter the challenges faced.