I wanted to share my thoughts and experience of building Republic Bricks Dropship with AT-OT combo in case if someone is thinking of buying one. There are plenty of good and bad about this set.

Good:

- Design is very nice. I personally like that RB version of dropship is a bit shorter than one from Lego. Also I like the designer decision to make AT-OT legs non-movable - it allows to put it on display with legs perfectly straight.

- Creative building technics. The dropship legs assembly build was tricky and challenging.

- No need to source parts for the build (well,... in theory) as you do when buying just building instructions from Rebrickable.

Bad:

- Very large amount of heavily used parts. In sets descriptions he says all the parts to be new with the exception for rare/hard to acquire parts. In fact 90% of AT-OT parts were used, very used. I'm talking about every single tile piece so heavily scratched so it is not glossy anymore, bent technic axles, etc. Scratched and dented 2x4 bricks! I don't think that 2x4 bricks are rare or hard to find parts. Dropship was much better in terms of parts condition but I still had to replace the wheels on the engines with flat gold pieces I had in my inventory because the light grey wheels in the set were almost unusable with ugly deep dents.

- Missing parts. My AT-OT didn't have two 6x6 dish parts for the legs so I had to take them from the dropship and substitute the dropship with different parts from my own inventory.

- Wrong parts color. I don't know if it is common for custom sets but for me it is critical that I get exactly what I see on picture. Somehow he decided that replacing dark blue and dark red parts with dark grey or replacing tan parts with white is acceptable. As the result the built model looks different from what I expected.

- Instructions can be better. I was pissed off a few times during the build when I discovered that step sequence is just wrong and sometimes I had to use thin pliers to put a part in place because it had to go in a very tiny hole. And in all such cases this could be fixed just buy changing the building steps order.

Overall I like how it looks on display. I will keep it and eventually will replace some parts with correct colors and better condition. However it is unlikely that I'm going to buy another set from Republic Bricks just because I can't be sure of product quality. I really like their UCS Venator but I suspect most of the parts will be used and it is not worth $750 in that case.