Lego story #019: Transforming the Mandalorian's ship

Four alternate builds for the 75321 Star Wars Razor Crest microfighter.

Something I do a lot on my phone these days is look at alternate builds on Rebrickable.com. 

Alternate builds turn official Lego sets into different models. I'll show you 4 examples in this post.

I'm amazed by how a small set of less than 100 pieces can be repurposed for so many different builds. That's the beauty of bricks and blocks!

Getting mocky

The examples below are the first MOCs I tried making. They aren't my designs; they're MOCs by other Lego fans. A MOC ("my original creation") is a fan-made Lego design.

Rebrickable.com has a huge repository of MOC instructions. Some are free, and others cost a fee to download. 

I chose 4 alternate-build MOCs of the Star Wars Razor Crest microfighter (pictured above), which was released in 2022. Alternate builds only use parts found within a single Lego set. These four happened to be free instructions, so I was pleased to get even more value out of a $10 microfighter set.

Microfighters, by the way, are tiny versions of Star Wars ships, geared towards young builders aged 6+. Razor Crest is the protagonist's ship in the Star Wars Mandalorian TV series.

Mando Speeder by dorianbricktron

If you click on the "Mando Speeder" link above, you'll see that the designer has photographed this MOC with a green pointy-eared creature named Grogu. Grogu's just there for cuteness; he isn't part of the Razor Crest microfighter set. I don't have a Grogu minifigure, so I used another pointy-eared toy:

This speeder a fictional vehicle, not found in the official Star Wars universe. I like that designer dorianbricktron made something Star Warzy of his own.

Like many MOCs, including some in this post, it looks great but has parts that fall off easily. (Still, this is a nice-looking design.) It's not something your preschooler can swoosh around the room and expect to remain in one piece. But that's understandable for this set in particular, which uses many small pieces that are thin and flat.

N-1 Starfighter by PiXEL-DAN 

Turn the Razor Crest into an N-1 Starfighter! It's another ship that appears in the Mandalorian show, flown by the same protagonist.

Designer PiXEL-DAN has a nice selection of Star Wars vehicles, and I like their cover photos (to see, click on the designer's name in the subheading above).

Heavy Interceptor by SimplisticBrick

This ship fell apart pretty often as I was building it, but I really liked the compact-looking external design and the rear door that opens.

While writing this post, I checked the designer's page again and saw they had a handful of cool alternate builds for another Star Wars set called Trouble on Tatooine (75299).

That led me to discover many other fantastic-looking MOCs for the Tatooine set andddddd... to actually purchase the set! In other words, I ended up bending my rule of "No more Star Wars Lego sets." Ah, well.

But I have a nice summer project to look forward to now: photographing a series of over 10 MOCs for Trouble on Tatooine. Afterward, I may sell parts of the set to recoup 50% to 70% of the cost, or even make a profit if I don't keep any minifigures. (Selling Lego parts separately can be more profitable than selling one complete set.)

Slave I by jlherbst77

Made by a 12-year-old and posted by his parent, this is a version of Boba Fett's Slave One gunship. Not bad at all!

Since the ship belongs to Boba Fett, I photographed this MOC with a matching minifigure:

Slave One can be ridden either vertically or horizontally. Regardless, the pilot remains upright, thanks to some kind of gyro system.

The vertical mode of Slave One really caught my eye in The Empire Strikes Back—the 1980 movie in which Boba Fett first appears.

Recently, the Star Wars franchise seems to be avoiding use of the ship's name, likely due to its negative connotations.

The microfighter released this year was simply called "Boba Fett's Starship" (75312). And in The Book of Boba Fett TV series, Boba calls it his "Firespray gunship," referring to the ship's model name.

In case you don't know him, Boba Fett is a character from the original Star Wars trilogy movies and the first to appear in Mandalorian armor.

When I was a kid, he was my favorite Star Wars character despite being a minor one who ends up dead (or so we thought). 

There are several iterations of the armored Boba Fett minifigure. 

This is possibly the cheapest one, possibly because it has plain arms rather than arms printed with representations of his armor and gear. Introduced in 2016, it exists in only 2 sets. I got it for 2,380 yen (about USD 17) and have contemplated selling his cape—called a "pauldron" in Lego terminology—as this cloth piece alone can fetch 2,000 yen. But I digress.

******

As I said earlier, it was fun to rediscover how one can build so many different things out of a small set. 

I'm sure I did free-building in my childhood (making anything I wanted, not just following an instruction manual), but as an adult I prefer to use instructions, at least for now. In this season of life I lack the time and headspace to free-build creatively. Which is why I love looking at Rebrickable!

Here's the full list of MOCs available on Rebrickable for the 75321 Razor Crest microfighter. I only built the ones I liked best.

Building these MOCs gave me a new appreciation for official Lego sets, which have to meet many standards including stability. Sets aimed at young children, especially, have to be pretty stable and not fall apart easily.

Look forward to more MOC photos in the future!

Next post: Lego Bonsai and more Mandalorian goodness.