This is a really sleek swooshy spaceship, but it’s not got a lot of seats for a shuttle. Can it even seat two people?

Awesome set!

Strange they chose this over the much more common three-winged shuttle with the spherical cockpit, but it looks so much cooler, I'm not complaining.

WE NEED NEW SHAAK TI!

I’ve never built it, but I vaguely remember getting this just for the minifigs. The thing is, I could have sworn I got it October 2010, on discount for helping out with our LEGO Store’s grand opening. If it’s from a year later, I’m not sure when I would have bought it. Maybe I just bought it at full price to get a May 4th promo? I always tried to get three of any minifig polybag they offered, so I did buy a fair number of sets I didn’t really want, just to hit spend thresholds.

@iwybs said:
"This is a really sleek swooshy spaceship, but it’s not got a lot of seats for a shuttle. Can it even seat two people?"

I have it and can confirm the cockpit seats 4 (its a squish) ;)

As pointless as the wing-turning-fanservice-thingy is, it's a pretty little ship and I want it!

Unfortunately most of the white pieces on this one faded to yellow for me. I regret dismantling the ship though, fun set.

Kinda looks like the Separatist Diamond-class cruiser.

An elegant ship, from a more civilised age.

Too bad mine has yellowed, even Shaak Ti I believe. And the stickers are peeling.

I really really like this ship, wish i had it but i only ever saw it at my cousins house. Might have to buy it from bricklink honestly. (Those clone wars minifigures tho, lol)

Cool looking ship. But the eyes on those minifigs are quite disturbing, they look almost like knock-offs from todays perspective.

I always wanted this one due to the Shaak Ti minifig. It looked very different to most of the grey boxes of the other Clone Wars sets.

@lotographia said:
"If you kind of squint it looks like a shoe"

Can't unsee that.

hmm, I'm afraid I much prefer SW sets today, than that.

Righto Lego, if you want to make some easy coin, you will make another one of these.

I always liked the crescent fish shape. And it's just practical to have it spin to a flat form. But as a shuttle it's not very practical at this scale. And it's already very large...
Especially in flight mode. It looks so majestic!

I miss the days when we would often get new ship designs from the tv series. We get some new ones now too, but those are often OT or Sequel era and use angular grey designs instead of the more regal shapes of ships from the Prequel era.

Bought it used a couple of years ago with all the figs. I ended up keeping Saesee Tiin and Shaak Ti and selling the ship, Obi-Wan and Anakin. I did have time to build it and play with it a little. But I was not a uge fan.

@Binnekamp:
Flat wings when landing, I understand. What’s not practical at all is flipping them vertical for flight. What point is there to the wings? They won’t provide any degree of lift in atmospheric flight, and I can’t think of any other benefit to verticalness. I honestly feel like this sort of design (like the Mandalorian fighter, the V-19, etc) is only done because everyone remembers that iconic shot of the Imperial shuttle folding up its wings as it enters the DS2 docking bay, and want to design something with more action to the landing process than a Snowspeeder.

@PurpleDave , the boring answer is: Toys. Moving wings are more fun than static ones.

Another answer is aesthetics. Like I said, it looks nice. It's like a crest on a peacock. Not everything has to be the same super utilitarian Sci-Fi design. In-universe it could just be to look nice and maybe even signal that someone important is on-board or something. Like a Republic signal stating 'don't shoot this or you'll get into political trouble'. In-universe it's an older ambassador shuttle from before the Clone Wars and is unarmed, so it's a possibility.
Oh, and there's at least one image of it docking right next to a platform. This way it doesn't need to rotate the wings and would take even less space as it's not on the platform itself.

But let's not forget: Star Wars is not science fiction. At it's heart it is science fantasy. There's wizards, magic, princesses, farmer boys who become heroes and more. In the prequel era it was of course more things than that, but at its core Star Wars is not this super rigid and logical universe. As things were fleshed out over time it just became more and more defined and codified in a certain way. A key part of the EU was to explain things about the Star Wars universe and build off of that. There certainly is a lot of world building in the films themselves. But don't forget that a lot of details were first thought up not from a worldbuilding perspective, but a filmmaking perspective. Things need to look menacing despite being impractical. Or regal foremost, realism comes after that.
Why is there a command bridge on a Star Destroyer? Because real-life giant ships have them too and this makes them look even more menacing compared to if they just were giant grey wedges. Why are there explosions in space? Because spectacle. Etc.

Apparently the cockpit design of this thing was later used on the B-Wing. Another answer might be that it was designed as a republic precursor of the B-Wing. Which, might I add, has an even weirder design in the gyroscopic cockpit atop a long fighter with two side wings.

I'd just like to get the Shaak Ti minifigure from this set; honestly that's all. Aside from just being a cool character in general, she's also one of the very few minifigures who I feel like actually make the Clone-Wars-style eyes work for her.

@Brickalili said:
"Never quite understood the Star Wars fascination for “wings must spin!”"

They got tired of “wings must open/close!”