I took acquisition of my C70 Retrofit via a LEGO Shop at Home special. Purchase $75 and get the polybag for free. Sure why not, I could buy a few planet sets. The LEGO Company generally sets the value of these at $3.99. However it'll set you back $10.51 on average to get it from Bricklink or somewhere around $6.00 on that other site. Shipping not included.
As far as I'm concerned this ship was done well compared to the Wookieepedia image. My untrained eye isn't too worried about the slenderness of the real thing or the multitude of guns. What does bug me is the dark red stripe side to side that doesn't appear on the more official image. Furthermore since only two of the studs are covered it mean that the two on the ends are exposed. Similar to the Z-95 they most certainly could have used a tile here and locked it in place with the stacking on top. So there's one small strike.
Call me a perfectionist but I can't stand gaps. The helm has a small gap behind it. This gap is caused by a 2 stud space being filled with a tile, a brick, and a half-plate from a bracket. What remains is a half-stud gap. It looks fine in the pictures but when you hold it it looks a little - hokey? A little redesign could have resulted in pushing that bracket back one stud and elongating the cylinder to be two bricks and a tile. This would have filled the gap and made that portion of the fuselage a little more in scale. Or maybe it would have looked terrible with the rest of the ship.
The set contains 45 + 2 extra parts in dark red and bleys. Nice parts and fairly useful but if you're purchasing it for ten and a half your parts will be 20c each. Part out value is $5.42 so you're better off building it from what you have and supplementing from a purchase or two. This is not exactly a set you'll be buying for the parts. I'll have to be honest, my eyes are glazing over a little from all these extra-canonical ships. Soon I don't know that I'll be able to tell one from the other.
Tune in next week when I'll just post a new review with backlinks: "Looks almost like a ship from the original trilogy in dark red and bleys..." Unless you have a better opinion.
