Saturday, January 4, 2014

HH-87 Starhopper (#75024)

This set was featured in roughly eight episodes of Clone Wars, most prominently in a brief story arc  in which Obi-Wan fakes his death and goes under cover as a bounty hunter named Rako Hardeen.

The set comes with Obi-Wan/Rako Hardeen, a Nikto guard, and the second version of Cad Bane. There's also a nice little speeder bike which gets stored under the ship.

Here's a photo of the 75024 Cad Bane on the right and the 8128 version on the left.

Here's the side view. Twin cannons/ flick fire missiles on each side and the angled stabilizer wings.

In the episodes (and the Wookiepedia article), the cannons stick out a bit further, so I modified it to match.

Rear view... You can see the speeder sticking out a bit from underneath.

In landing position with the wings folded up...

Here's a close-up of the cockpit, just in case you were curious.

And a view from the bottom to show where the speeder tucks away. There's a "button" on top which will deploy the speeder. There's actually enough room to stow the speeder with a minifig still seated on it.

 It's a pretty basic set, but still fun to build. I was impressed with the extra support and reinforcement they put into keeping the wings in place. You can see in the last picture where they used the brown technic axle to reinforce the wings and keep them in place.

One drawback to this model is there's no place to store Rako's sniper rifle (standard long rifle with a black lightsaber hilt on the end of the barrel). I had to attach the hilt to the rifle handle, rather than the barrel, in order to get it to fit in the cockpit.

I'd give this one an 8.5/10. It lost a few points for inadequate weapon storage and flick-fire missiles, but it is well designed and holds up to normal play. If you're a fan of the bounty hunters, I think this one is a must-have.

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