75275 A-wing Starfighter plaque errors
Posted by CapnRex101,
Information plaques have accompanied various Ultimate Collector Series sets, beginning during 2000 when the distinct 7181 TIE Interceptor and 7191 X-wing Fighter became available.
Unfortunately, these plaques frequently include errors. 75275 A-wing Starfighter seems particularly guilty in that regard, featuring no fewer than five different mistakes on the information plaque! You can view these after the break...
Please be aware, this article contains Star Wars pedantry!
- The length is incorrectly given as 9.60 metres. This figure has appeared in various older reference works but the modern canon length is 6.90 metres which seems much more accurate when compared with the movie.
- 'Kuat System Engineering' should be pluralised as 'Kuat Systems Engineering'. LEGO has included the correct name on previous UCS plaques.
- The weapons information suggests that the A-wing includes a single concussion missile launcher but it actually features two. This mistake may be attributable to limited space on the plaque.
- 'Incom GBK-785 hyperdrive unit' should read 'Incom GBk-785 hyperdrive unit'.
- Lucasfilm consistently stylises '...-wing' vehicles with a lower case 'w' rather than the upper case 'A-Wing Starfighter'. This error has appeared on past UCS plaques and is extremely minor, admittedly.
Canon reference information for the RZ-1 A-wing originates from the Haynes Workshop Manual for Rebel Starfighters, written by Ryder Windham, Chris Reiff and Chris Trevas.
While I do look out for mistakes on Ultimate Collector Series plaques, they certainly do not detract from my enjoyment of these sets. Of course, I would rather the information was correct though!
Are you aware of errors that LEGO has made in earlier sets and do they bother you? Let us know in the comments.
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68 comments on this article
Bruh moment. Oh well, these things happen. I'm sure if they fix it for future factory runs, these first plaques with the errors will be worth more!
I wonder what it's like inside Captain Rex's head?
Limited space on the plaque? There's a huge empty space at the bottom, they could just have made it 2 lines. Sloppy, sloppy... (I obviously hadn't noticed any mistakes)
Trivia, Ryder Wyndham the author of the Rebel Starfighter Guide; also wrote several Bionicle books in 2015-2016.
A-wings are made by Incom anyway, so it doesn't matter that Kuat Systems Engineering is misspelled :P
The official Databank entry still gives the length as 9.6m, so I guess there's still some debate on that front!
https://www.starwars.com/databank/a-wing-fighter
It would also be better if they would put the technical name on top of the plaque (in this case "RZ-1 A-wing interceptor") instead of the more common name as it is displayed here. That would be more consistent with other UCS sets which usually use the technical name.
From https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/RZ-1_A-wing_interceptor/Legends:
Like other ships (Executor, for example), the size of the A-wing is in dispute. Fans argue that the 9.6 meters and the derived width and height are too big, because visual evidence from Return of the Jedi seems to suggest the A-wing is very small compared to other starfighters; close-up shots of A-wing pilots show that the cockpit is cramped, and suggest the entire ship cannot be very large.
A size analysis of the studio model used for Return of the Jedi suggests that the length of the ship is half as long as the documented 9.6 meters. Star Wars Technical Journal of the Rebel Forces states the model is 60 cm long and the pilot figure a 1/8 scale action figure, which results into a length of 4.8 meters. However, it should be noted that it is entirely possible the 1/8 figure was only used because it fit in the cockpit of the model.
Another way to determine the size by comparing the headroom of the pilot with the relative size of the cockpit to the entire fighter, would be to compare the cockpit film set with the studio model.
The size comparison chart found in the 2011 reference book Millennium Falcon Owner's Workshop Manual also depicts an RZ-1 A-wing. By using the well documented sizes of the Millennium Falcon and the X-wing as a scale, the resulting A-wing size is roughly 7.0 meters.
Although it is unknown on what the original 9.6 meter figure is based on, like the issue on Home One, the official length remains 9.6 meters until a canon source states otherwise.
I'm glad that you consider "A-Wing" to be a minor error. As opposed to the glaring mistake that is "GBK" versus "GBk". ;)
Also I was noticing the background color of the sticker is 11:48pm black, and not midnight black. Good going, Lego knuckleheads. Do your freaking homework before asking us to pay $200 for a set! Hard pass for me. Don’t even get me started on the price per piece, or how there are fewer than 12 minifigures included in this supposedly “UCS” set.
If 1 Star Wars centimetre is equal to 7.2 earth millimetres then the 9.6 Star Wars Meters long A-wing can be equal to 6.9 earth meters and everyone is happy...….
I have no excuse for the other 4 mistakes.
I guess the length issue can be excused given it's officially 9.6m long but the other errors show a lack of proof-reading by LFL, assuming someone there had to approve it.
Wow. I did not know that Lucasfilm themselves write “wing” with little “w”. I always see and write by myself “?-Wing”. It seems better than with little “w”. (That was pretty many w’s.)
Bouy on the main sail of 42105, instead of the correct Buoy.
Well, after searching for maybe every wings on the Internet, no one almost writes “Wing”. Whoops.
"Please be aware, this article contains Star Wars pedantry!"
From a CapnRex101 article? I never would have guessed...
All kidding aside, even though my brain is so full of 40+ years of Star Wars fandom that I'm completely uninterested in such details these days, I know there are lots of fans out there who appreciate your attention to the small things that make up the Lego Star Wars world.
@stephan3321 said:
"Bouy on the main sail of 42105, instead of the correct Buoy."
That's quite an error! Never would have noticed it myself though :-)
Nerds...
Soap met worst ;)
You had me at “pedantry”
A Spitfire is about 10m long. Is an A-Wing (sorry, wing) really 3m shorter than that?
Sheild your eyes!
I really don't understand why Lego doesn't hire one person more to do proper proofreading. One person can always make a mistake, but for two it's much harder. Like the Milwauke on the Harley-Davidson, and regular errors in the instructions, most of which aren't even registered on the internet somewhere, it seems.
Not that I am into any of the "facts" on these plaques but I have to say 2 things. Firstly we all know Star wars is not based on a true story right so all the facts are made up........ and secondly would Lego not have to get approval from both Lego and Disney on this product ? So 2 sets of people have either agreed its right or didn't check.
There is a good article on the length of the A-wing here http://www.rebelscale.com/scale-lists/star-wars-size-analyses/a-wing-size/
Starwars.com gives the official length of 9.6m.
If you look at the picture on that site and consider the length of a person in an upright seated position is about half a metre. So comparing the pilot in that image to the spaceship about 9-10m is accurate.
In terms of other typos, the Millennium Falcon apparently has 12 quad laser cannons and Boba Fett's Slave 1 has a "tracor" beam. Never spotted other mistakes on the UCS plaques. Lego seem to have dropped the ball on this one...
Of course, this might all be updated in the future and having a "wrong" plaque makes it more of a collector's item.
well, that stinks
@Wrecknbuild said:
"I really don't understand why Lego doesn't hire one person more to do proper proofreading. One person can always make a mistake, but for two it's much harder."
When two people work the same job they push off the responsibility on their colleague.
I assume these issues are more prevalent because ever more people are working on the same thing.
I wish there were a way to find out which jobs and positions actually exist in set production. A real credits list, not just the designer interview which is more akin to a director claiming he made a movie by himself.
One would think with the few writings and letters appearing on bricks and within sets that a single person should be able to proofread and correct all of these things flawlessly.
That bothers me a lot. Hopefully they fix it.
I really don't think the prop guys, writers, and staff could ever fathom at the time how big Star Wars would be so I think they just made things work. They probably didn't give a second thought about a future fan that would nitpick the actual length of their physical prop in comparison to a fantasy vehicle. If it looked good on camera it worked; job done. I get it though, just like Lego people are passionate about their hi hobbies.
Honestly if I was just some poor sap looking for very specific info on a ship with two different expanded universes to deal with, I'd be prone to errors as well. Still, hopefully they'll issue a fixed version. This set's not cheap so it's the least they could do.
I’m always getting my 6s and 9s muddled when it comes to quoting lengths. Easily done.
By the way, what does LFL mean?
If I recall correctly, the DeLorean IDEAS set misspelled “Flux Capacitor,” at least in the initial run. It bugged me at the time, but to be fair, I’d completely forgotten about it until seeing this article!
Slow news day huh
This has also made me think. Do they only produce the UCS plaques in English ? Seems a little unfair to other languages. Mind you now I think I suppose most sets are just in English. Who knows what "City" or "Friends" means in other languages. Would Star wars be two words in another language therefore they could be translated, or is it the fact that "Star Wars" is a registered trade mark etc?
LFL - Lucasfilm ltd.
'This error has appeared on past UCS plaques and is extremely minor, admittedly.'
Just like every other error on this pointless article besides the length.
@BooTheMightyHamster - My head certainly contains plentiful nonsense relating to Star Wars!
@sid3windr - I thought the graphic designer might have wanted to include all the weapons information on the same line, just to keep things tidy.
@The_Green_Brick_Giant - If anybody found the article at all interesting or informative then it was not pointless. Evidently some people have!
With regard to the length given in the Star Wars Databank, I am inclined to trust modern reference works and Wookieepedia as the Databank is not consistently updated.
The one that bugs me the most by far is the 10179 UCS MF plaque. Not because they made the error (12 quad cannons?), but because I didn't find out about the replacement sticker until after I'd already applied the original sticker w/ error from my 1st Edition copy, and because I didn't think about asking for the corrected reprint until it was no longer available.
@ChocolateCrisps:
For a long time the most glaring "canon" error was the length of the SSD vs the ISD. Most of the dimensions and such, and a lot of the alien names/culture/lore didn't come from Lucasfilm. West End Games, the first company to ever get the Star Wars RPG license, made a truckload of stuff up to include in that RPG. Information sources were pretty much nonexistent. Take, for instance, Ep5. While some people managed to lay hands on 35mm theatrical prints, or Betamax tapes produced exclusively for the rental market, I believe the best the home market had available for a long time was a heavily condensed 8mm print with no audio. There was no internet (not for the general public, at least), so you couldn't just look stuff up or hold discussions with people all over the world. So for decades it had been cemented in official canon that the SSD was 5x as long as the SSD, even though there's a shot in Ep5 where you can see an ISD pass in front of what is clearly a _much_ larger SSD in the background, besides the fact that their bridges look exactly the same shape and should be able to establish a true scale between the two. Now it looks like canon has been adjusted to more than double the length of the SSD and peg it at closer to 12x the length of the ISD. So, sometimes canon is clearly wrong about stuff. Then there's the Millennium Falcon, which is massively inconsistent across the OT. The relative size between interior/exterior shots changes, the number/size/location of the landing gear changes, and even the number of windshield panes in the cockpit changes. The first person to ever make a UCS-style, minifig-scale model tried to figure out the true layout of the interior and determined that, based on what we see in relation to known locations in the ship, there's no layout that's physically possible because the production team just made up bits and pieces as needed for specific scenes without ever planning out a cohesive layout.
@MTBrickHouse:
Even if they did, it wouldn't have mattered. Such things cost money to develop, which wasn't included in the film budget. People don't realize how cheaply actual film props are often made compared to a fan-produced replica that they'll probably want to hold up to some wear and tear. The ISD main engines were made from L'eggs pantyhose containers, which were designed to last long enough for a woman to get them home and not much longer. Your typical dollar store Easter eggs are more sturdily made than they were.
When it comes to Lego UCS plates:
Do. Or do not. There is no try.
;-)
@Huw said:
"Are you aware of errors that LEGO has made in earlier sets (...)" ?
I remember the spelling error in the flux capacitor of the 21103 set (it is printed 'sheild' instead of 'shield'), but LEGO did a recall of this part and shipped a new one with the correct spelling.
Lego had to send me 3 more stickers for the Slave 1 UCS before they got it right !
The Nitpicker's guide to a galaxy far far away ;-)
Well, at least they are minor. I guess the Rebel Scum can not have good prove readers huh? Are you telling me it's on all the plaques (sees Imperial and the MF), oh well in that case mut be a slight oversight.
Very nerdy article... but I love it!
With all the inaccuracies, I think the title's "fi" ligature in Starfighter with the descender looks nice.
I just wish they'd kept using Bank Gothic as the font like they did on the first couple.
A bit of a nit pick that gets to me is in the Harry Potter sets where the emblem of Ravenclaw house is supposed to be an eagle but it's been printed as a raven on all the stickers. It's a mistake that's been made hundreds of times but I was hoping Lego would have been able to a tiny bit of research.
The length bothers me the most. How could you look at that and conclude it’s 9.6m long? An alarm bell in someone’s head should’ve gone off.
@Judge_Fudge (and others): slightly unrelated, but they've really cut back on proofreaders in journalism/media fields compared to a few years ago. If the main field for communications doesn't see value in hiring proofreaders, it wouldn't surprise me if Lego doesn't either. This is all conjecture of course. Maybe they're just not big Star Wars fans.
‘You are more powerfull [sic] than you would ever imagine...’ https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3068bpb0313T=S&C=88&O={"color":88,"iconly":0}
@Zander said:
"‘You are more powerfull [sic] than you would ever imagine...’ https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=3068bpb0313T=S&C=88&O={"color":88,"iconly":0}"
Olde Engliish ;)
Has anybody noticed that the curved line on the left is grey instead of blue? is it a new design or another error?
@BooTheMightyHamster said:
"I wonder what it's like inside Captain Rex's head?"
A pink 2x2 brick?
NEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRRD!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just teasing! Great attention to details!
This are quite small details, but errors nonetheless.
@greenhorn said:
"By the way, what does LFL mean?"
Lucasfilm Licensing.
"Do they only produce the UCS plaques in English? Seems a little unfair to other languages."
Their German translation of "We're starting our attack run!" on the UCS Y-wing packaging meant "We're stepping on the gas pedal!". So I'm glad they don't even try to translate the UCS plaques.
@Huw:
The weirdest misprint I know of is the original Harley Quinn minifig from 2008. The base color was red, and they printed white and black layers on it. The problem is they mixed up the order in which they printed these, so black was printed over white. The most significant result of this is that the curved line that's supposed to denote her right breast got blanked out. There's also some bits missing on the curved lines representing her female waistline. For a long time, I thought this was the only version out there, but then I bumped into Greg Hyland at Brickworld, and he had a Harley that had been printed correctly. Turns out it was _the_ Harley Quinn minifig that was used for box art photography, which had been forwarded on to him to use as a model for the comic strips that appear on the box and in the instruction booklet, but it got my interest piqued again and I was eventually able to track down a seller who had both versions of the torso. They had at least two production runs of the torso. At least one run (the first) was mixed up, and at least one run (the last) was corrected.
@rocoflyer:
The layout of UCS plaque stickers has been very inconsistent. The first two sets were the 7191 X-wing and the 7181 TIE Interceptor. Of these, only 7181 had blue lines. 7191 had the outline of the X-wing and both curved lines in some shade of brown or tan. Other UCS sets didn't even have that motif, like 10030 which showed the ISD oriented horizontally from the starboard side rather than diagonally from above. Or General Grievous, which had an closeup of Grievous' face that looked more like comic book art than the traditional line-art design.
@SirZed:
It may be trans-green, now...
@PurpleDave
The layout of UCS plaque stickers has been very inconsistent. The first two sets were the 7191 X-wing and the 7181 TIE Interceptor. Of these, only 7181 had blue lines. 7191 had the outline of the X-wing and both curved lines in some shade of brown or tan. Other UCS sets didn't even have that motif, like 10030 which showed the ISD oriented horizontally from the starboard side rather than diagonally from above. Or General Grievous, which had an closeup of Grievous' face that looked more like comic book art than the traditional line-art design.
Those are examples of twenty or fifteen years ago!!!, when there was not a clear ucs plaque “standard” as it is now. Does it make any sense to have a grey line on a design that has been always blue? The grey color for lines/images on ucs style stickers has been used only for non-sw sets and never mixed with blue. IMHO it is a mistake, unless TLG is using a new design, which I do not like by the way, :-) We will find out if they correct it on a second run or if they keep using it on following ucs sets...
Genuine mistakes about a fictional space vehicle.... OMG the horror! LOL
@Ephseb said:
"A-wings are made by Incom anyway, so it doesn't matter that Kuat Systems Engineering is misspelled :P"
Incom made them in Legends. In canon they were made by Kuat to further illustrate that the A-wing was a followup from the Delta-7s that the Jedi flew
Another nitpick: the title simply says "A-Wing starfighter" instead of "RZ-1 A-wing starfighter". This makes it inconsistent with the other UCS sets. The Snowspeeder's plaque said "T-47 Airspeeder" instead of "Snowspeeder," the Y-Wing's said "BTL-A4 Y-Wing starfighter", the X-wing's said "T-65 X-Wing" etc.
@ChocolateCrisps said:
"The official Databank entry still gives the length as 9.6m, so I guess there's still some debate on that front!
https://www.starwars.com/databank/a-wing-fighter"
That is a pretty compelling case for 9.6m. I can't really decide from looking at pictues.
Who cares?