Star Wars MOC Tatooine Radar Base Building Review

 

Hey brick fans, welcome back to Bricks and Figs, my blog about interesting MOCs, minifigures and other building block sets.  Back in the summer, I saw this set on Aliexpress, maybe it's been there for awhile but I've never noticed it until now. It's a MOC building that you would find in a Star Wars Mos Eisley layout.  It would look right at home next to the Cantina set.

There are quite a few MOC Tatooine sets on Aliexpress that have been copied from Rebrickable, from designers The_Minikit_Guy, gabizon, and Legat_of_Legion, and others to name a few.  

This particular MOC set is listed on Aliexpress as the >Desert Radar Base , and I found it intriguing because I couldn't find where this set originated from.  I searched for Tatooine and Mos Eisley on Rebrickable, and while there were nearly 300 MOC entries, this set wasn't one of them.  I also did a google image search but the only matches I found, came from Aliexpress.

Anyways, I ordered the set to review it and it came in about a month or so.  Mine cost a smidgen over $40 CAD ($30 USD), so it's not like really cheap for the 453 pieces.  I would have preferred if this set was in the $20 price range.

You get a bag of parts and a 16x32 baseplate.  The instructions for the set are obtained by scanning the QR code on the bag and downloading it to your phone.

There are 453 brick pieces, comprised of mostly tan bricks with a few brown and gray bricks.  No stickers or minifigures come with this set.

The set isn't that difficult to build, I would estimate you should be able to finish it in about 30 mins to 1 hour.  Brick quality and clutch was generally fine.  In my picture above, I've added my own parts, namely the black girder on the roof and the brown bin.  I also added a stormtrooper minifigure so you can see the scale of the building. I replaced the original 16x32 stud baseplate with my own 32x32 stud baseplate because I wanted a display area in front of the buildings.

There were a few extra pieces leftover from the build.

This radar building set is composed of two buildings joined by an archway.  The smaller building has a doorway that is blocked by chain links.  There are a couple of radar dishes on the roof.  The larger building has a large archway with a brown door and a small tower on the roof.  There's also 3 more smaller communication antennas on the roof.

There's not much going on in the rear of the buildings.  The roofs haven't been designed to come off because there's no interior in either building.

There's some pipes on the front and either side of the buildings, the red flowers are supposed to be shut-off valves, I think.

Not sure if this is a window or door.  Here's a few more pics.

Fortunately, there are some pipes on the sides of the buildings for visual interest, otherwise this would be a pretty bland build.

If you are interested in getting this building or similar ones for your Star Wars Mos Eisley/Tatooine diorama, you can find it by searching for "Tatooine house" on Aliexpress.

In summary, while I think this building is nice enough to make a display out of it, there's not much in the way of play value. I think it definitely needs to be changed so that the roofs can be removed and furnished with some kind of interior,  like some computer terminals or monitoring stations inside the radar base.  I would also replace the pipe valves with some flat circular tiles, maybe in light gray colour.  Oh and maybe add some lighting for a nice effect.

Anyways, that's it for this post.  Let me know what you think in the comments below. Thanks for checking it out, bye for now!