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LEGO Star Wars 75252 Ultimate Collector Series Imperial Star De- community. Articles may include aDliate links, and
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The LEGO Star Wars line’s latest massive set in the Ultimate Collector Series is 75252 Imperial
Star Destroyer, clocking in at a whopping 4,784 pieces and two miniIgures, with a price to match
the part count (US $699.99 | CAN $849.99 | UK £649.99). Depicting Darth Vader’s Wagship Devas-
tator seen at the end of Rogue One leading into the Irst moments of A New Hope, this is the Irst
UCS ISD since 10030 in 2002 and the Irst UCS set since 75181 Y-wing StarIghter nearly 18
months ago. But is there more to this huge LEGO set than gray wedge plates? Let’s Ind out…
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The packaging & instructions

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The new UCS Imperial Star Destroyer ships in a large square box similar in both size and design
to the huge box that so surprised us when 75192 UCS Millennium Falcon arrived on our doorstep
exactly two years ago. The front of the box shows the ISD Devastator over Tatooine, without the
stand, and with the Tantive IV Wying alongside (or below — about to be swallowed into the dock-
ing bay). The “Ultimate Collector Series” branding is unambiguous in the upper banner of the box.
It’s worth noting that the detailed retail box ships in a large, plain cardboard box that Its snugly
around the retail box, but the damaged corners indicate that the shipping box is no proof against
the inner box getting roughed up in transit.

The back of the box shows the LEGO model in a more realistic setting, complete with the stand,
speciIcation plaque, and miniIgures, as well as the Rebel Blockade Runner attached near the
port side bow.

In what we believe is a Irst for large LEGO sets, the box includes instructions on how to open it,
with a small graphic of a utility knife cutting open the tape holding the Waps closed.

Opening the outer Waps reveals inner Waps printed with the Imperial logo beneath a top-down view
of the ISD. This is a subtle touch that heightens the “premium” perception of the set, though no
LEGO Star Wars set has yet achieved the same feeling of luxury in its packaging as LEGO Technic
sets like 42056 Porsche 911 GT3 RS three years ago.

White inner boxes contain all of the parts for the set — there are no loose bags alongside the in-
ner boxes. Each inner box is printed on the top and sides with schematics of the LEGO ISD.

As with the UCS Falcon, the printing on the sides of the boxes It together to form a different de-
sign, showing the ISD from the underside.

The single sticker in the set is the speciIcation panel. We’ve been saying for years that large
stickers are incredibly challenging to apply correctly, with much less margin for error (and a lot
more sticky surface area) than smaller stickers, and that LEGO should be printing the UCS spec
panels — something that our friends at Brickmania have done for their own “UCS-style” sets like
the B-17 Flying Fortress. We’ll continue repeating this recommendation until LEGO considers
making a change.

The instructions are in a 440-page, spiral-bound book, just a few pages shy of the UCS Falcon’s
466 pages. There are 1,015 steps, so quite a few less than the Falcon’s 1,379 steps, in line with
the lower part count in the ISD.

As with all UCS sets, the instruction book includes introductory material from the LEGO Star Wars
team. Head of design Jens Kronveld Frederiksen reprises his role introducing the set.

Subsequent pages include details about the Star Wars vehicle as it appears in the Classic Trilogy,
including interesting insights about the construction of the movie props. There are also two
lengthy interviews with Jens Kronveld Frederiksen and Senior Designer Henrik Andersen. Unlike
instructions with shorter introductory sections, our copy of the set that shipped from LEGO HQ in
Billund, Denmark (so presumably the global or European version) only includes the intro materials
in English, with copies of the instruction book in other languages available online.

The build

Parts for the set are packaged in nineteen groups of numbered bags (totaling 52 numbered bags)
plus six unnumbered bags (for a grand total of 58 bags of parts) and one loose 16×16 plate. Two
years ago we criticized the random order in which the UCS Falcon’s bags were packaged in the
inner boxes, and LEGO has improved this by packaging the numbered bags in order. However, the
unnumbered bags were distributed randomly throughout all the white boxes, forcing us to dump
everything out anyway to ensure we had all the necessary parts that went along with the parts in
the numbered bags. (It’s possible we missed the correlation between the numbered bags and the
larger parts in the unnumbered bags, but as we began building, it certainly felt random.) While
progress on grouping the numbered bags more logically is appreciated, inclusion of the larger
pieces in unnumbered bags that are distributed seemingly randomly has the same effect — forc-
ing the builder to dump all the bags out, retrieve the necessary (unnumbered) bags, and then
repack the numbered bags until they’re needed later.

Stands for LEGO sets are generally built at the end of the instructions and attached to the bottom
of the Inished model. The stand for the UCS ISD is directly integrated into the structural frame of
the model, so it’s the very Irst thing that you begin building. The Irst bag includes the two miniIg-
ures, which we’ll return to later in this review. The Irst three groups of numbered bags (we won’t
be covering the build bag-by-bag across all 19 groups and 58 total bags…) produce the stand, the
triangular Technic frame, and lateral greeble strips.

By the end of only the Irst set of bags, the central Technic core of the ISD is complete, comprised
of Technic panels held together vertically along the axis of the ship by Technic beams.

The second set of bags provides the upper surface of the central core, extending it forward to-
ward the bow. These bags also produce the frame for the rhomboid rear proIle of the vessel.

The rhombus or lozenge-shaped section at the stern where the engines are housed are reinforced
with cross-braces.

Around the mid-section of the ISD, angled red Technic panels provide another vertical surface
that will later support the weight of the skin built from System plates and tiles.

These extensions from the central core are integrated into the stand, distributing the eventual
weight of the completed ship.

The Irst portion of the build using “regular” (System) LEGO doesn’t begin until the third group of
bags and step 129. These bags produce two identical strips of greebles, including the lateral
quad-laser batteries. Although building two long, identical strips of greebles might seem a bit
repetitive, we simply built both in parallel, just doubling the parts we were looking for with each
step. This made these sections feel much less repetitive, given how varied the surface of the
strips are along their surface.

The greeble strips include blocks of bricks with Technic pin holes used to lock them into the
frame. While a long, Woppy strip of stacked plates isn’t particularly sturdy on its own, placing each
strip on its side and locking them into the Technic frame yields a surprisingly sturdy outer frame
to which the lower and upper surfaces will be attached next.

The next twelve groups of bags — and nearly 500 steps in the instructions — produce the lower
and upper surfaces of the ISD that attach to the frame. These sections are indeed quite repetitive,
with identical building techniques (stacking large plates with some minor surface detail).

The prow is secured by a pair of 1×1 rounded plates with handles attached to 1×3 double jumper
plates connected by a robot arm. This keeps the narrow wedge plates at the prow from spreading
apart.

The gray monotony is punctuated from time to time by building less-Wat sections of the surface —
the main docking bay, reactor dome, turbolasers, and the bank of engines at the rear. Similarly,
although the base surface is simply mirrored left and right, the surface details themselves are
asymmetrical.

The long greeble strips attached to the frame include 1×2 plates with towball sockets. These pro-
vide attachment points for the surface skin sections, which have extensions with corresponding
towballs.

LEGO has been making use of towball connections more and more recently for unconventional
connections — the excellent LEGO Stranger Things 75810 The Upside Down used towballs to at-
tach the inverted upper and lower sections of that build, for example. Although the towball con-
nections do provide some Wex (as we show in the photo below), once all of the sections are at-
tached and the superstructure is added over the plate sections, they are fairly secure.

After several hundred pages of building Wat surfaces, the bridge section comes as a welcome re-
lief. Bag groups 15 and 16 produce the iconic bridge tower that sits above the triangular surface
of the Imperial Star Destroyer. Like the rest of the LEGO ISD, the bridge tower has a Technic core
with plates on the surface. However, the skin sections attach to the Technic core via more con-
ventional techniques than towballs — 1×4 bricks with studs on their sides, brackets, and a few
clips. The base of the completed bridge slots onto the yellow sections extending up from the cen-
tral Technic core of the ISD, secured in place with axles. At this stage, the rather top-heavy bridge
tends to sway from side to side a bit, but this will be addressed later when we build the super-
structure around it.

The next two bags (17-18) produce the two largest sections of the superstructure, surrounding
(and securing) the bridge. These sections include inverted antennas that drop into the yellow 3×2
plates with holes in the base of the bridge tower. In other words, these superstructure sections sit
on top of the surface of the ISD, but they are not directly attached — there’s nothing but gravity
holding them in place. Although most builders are unlikely to Wip the whole ISD upside down, any-
body tempted to show off the ventral docking bay may Ind themselves rebuilding large sections
of the superstructure as it falls crashing to the Woor.

The Inal bag group (19) provide the parts for the forward section of the superstructure as well as
the microscale Rebel Blockade Runner. These also include asymmetrical greebling, and they at-
tach to the main superstructure segments with a non-friction Technic pin, held in line with a Tech-
nic axle pin. The low-friction attachment is important, as we’ll see later in this review.

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