Ewok85

I will be forever kicking myself for not buying the boat-rigging when it was $15 each :( In any case I'm very happy with my UCS Falcon - the only thing I don't have is bley levers (mine are all old-grey), and the large dark red plate on the bottom. Worked out to be about $500~600 without shipping, but I purchased parts for about 4 sets at once so its a real horrible mix that is hard to work out...

Quick follow-up on this - thank you so much for the advice! Using the amazing MOC X-Wing you linked I've built my own (well... three) and I'm waiting for a few parts to finish it off. I'll post a few pictures when I'm done :) I've been eyeing up the gorgeous Y-Wing that RenegadeClone made as well as Flail's MOC. I've got a wishlist up for a 7130 clone - having poked around a fair bit I decided the easiest way to scale out the models is to use the windshield as a common part and scale things around that - seems to work OK.

I bought old school light grey - personally I think the slightly off-color grey will make for a better look :)

No way you could build this for anything less than about $400 even with a magical multicolored Falcon ;) Roughly 5200 parts - almost 100 large technic blocks, over 150 large plates, almost 300 long plates, and a handful of expensive specialised parts (technic blocks, etc). Lets say all of the above is $0.40c each, and everything else is $0.06 each - that's $500 without any shipping. I still think $700~900 including shipping is a realistic goal if you want a perfect set.

While the topic is on scale - how many Lego SW sets are minifig scale? I've got the 6208 B-Wing which I feel is just the right size, and obviously 10179 Millenium Falcon and 10212 Shuttle. I'd love a good X-Wing, Y-Wing and snowspeeder to go with the other minifig scale ships, but there are so many now its hard to tell by pictures what would work best. (And an A-Wing, but the MOC creations are much better than any of the sets IMO)

Depends how you do it - an exact model is around $900~1100 going by current prices. You can probably get it down to about $700~800 if you research and change to cheaper bricks for certain items. There are a few parts which are rather unique to this model and are horribly inflated - the red plate on the bottom ($5~8), the radar dish on top ($25~30), the little antennas ($1/ea - you need about 60), the infamous boat rigging (2 at $15/ea), the very long technic pieces (around 50 at $1~2/ea) and weirdly some of the wedge shaped blocks - 40 or so at $1~2 for one side, $3 for the other. Just getting these parts alone will put you back $200~300.

After having missed out and shocked at the prices for this set, I'm very interested in buying the parts and building it myself. The biggest issue is probably going to be the same as it always is - sourcing parts from Japan. Is there any other threads I should be looking at? (Edit: not worth a new post but an edit is enough - found a guy selling 14 UCS sets - all of the vehicles - for a cool 1 million Japanese Yen. At todays rate - 9600 Euros. All are new in box except the Naboo fighter, which has been assembled and is reboxed. A little steep for me - doesn't really seem like good value either... Still, if I was rolling in money I'd jump on it