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Let’s talk about the next Haslab…
As it is often mentioned as a possible Haslab, here is my take on a studio scale Sandcrawler.
It has what most of us would want in a Haslab: scale, proper weathering, lights, sound (yes I can play the whole droid sale scene from the internal speaker as well as various Jawa sounds), and is remote controlled (forward, steering and opening/closing and of the front door).
Now why can’t Hasbro give us something like this ? Why do we instead get models with limited weathering and no lights nor sound?
Well, here is the reality check:
>This thing is enormous: at 116cm x 39cm x 51cm it dwarves even the barge in terms of sheer volume.
>Few collectors would have the space for it. Even then it is probably still subscale as you can see from the pictures with the TVC Luke. In the movie the tread is taller than Luke, so if Hasbro was producing a Haslab of this size I am sure some people would still complain that it should be 50% bigger…
>Cost: with the 4 motors needed to move this thing and all the hardware, electronics, PLA and paint this has cost me more than $800 to make. I can see any company being able to make something remotely resembling this for less than $1000 at retail.
Building this has given me a small taste of all the choices and challenges that come with designing a Haslab, and the difficulty of making it successful.
Now I would love this to be the next one (with newly sculpted Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru), and I am sure we all could live without the remote control, lights and sound, but I still think this is too big and too expensive to be successful as a crowd funded project. Especially if we keep getting a Haslab per year, as many collectors are already struggling for space.
