tetsujin

I heard back from Hasegawa USA (or Hobbico, I guess they're the US distributor) and they say they will be able to get me the decals. So, fingers crossed, hoping this works!

I popped them an e-mail (and HLJ as well - they don't do parts orders any more but I figure it's worth a shot) so hopefully something will come of it. Flood claimed a bunch of hobby magazines (basically all my Fine Scale Modelers were wrecked - plus a bunch of Hobby Japan and Dengeki got soaked too but I'm more determined to try to save those) and my prized stash of metric graph paper that I use for drawing plans, plus some old comic books. One Hase VF-25 basically lost its decal sheet while the other seems to have actually come through intact. (I've been trying to recover as much of that lost VF-25 decal sheet as I can, picking decals of other surfaces they settled on in the kit box, putting them back on the decal paper, but some of them are in tatters...) I haven't really looked at the Hase VF-1 that got soaked but I think its decal sheet is toast, too. And lots of kit boxes wrecked - not a serious loss but it does leave various kits without a storage solution. Some equipment got soaked, too - like my computer's UPS, some old camcorders and some vintage gear (a C-64 and a VT-100) my old PC was basically underwater and my current PC may taken on a bit of water before I removed it (not sure - power was already off at the time - but I haven't actually tried powering it up again yet) - plus various project-related electronics and components like my Arduinos, various LCD displays, and my Raspberry Pi Zeros all got soaked. Not sure how much of that stuff is wrecked. But the real concern honestly is the room itself. I've got to get some pros in there with a big dehumidifier and heater to dry out the room and hopefully prevent mold. (But first I've got to clean up the place, clear out as much floor space as I can - room was a bit of a nightmare even before it got flooded, honestly...)

Well the answer I want is one that solves my problem, but the answer I need is the truth of the situation. Thanks.

Hi, my workspace recently flooded and destroyed a bunch of stuff - among other things, the decals from both of my Hasegawa VF-25's. Is there a good way to get replacement decal sheets for the kit? Originals, preferably, rather than third-party Alps decals or something... Alternately, since the kit comes with decals for Ozma's and Alto's fighters - if I buy additional kits, how far is the decal sheet from being able to cover a second model? I know there's some simple stuff that's not repeated, like some black stripes, and some other stuff like SMS markings and warning markings... (I'd actually wanted to use these decal sheets to supplement my Bandai builds, too... whole situation kind of sucks... It got some of my other Hase Macross kits, too.)

It's not as though the two options are mutually exclusive. Because people don't agree, and are willing to openly and frankly discuss their opinions, does not mean they don't get along.

Multi-stage injection doesn't do anything for this problem - after the first stage of injection, the later stages would still have to be arranged in such a way that the mold halves could neatly encase the later-stage part, and separate from it when injection was done. Unless they were going to make a pilot figure with moving joints (which would allow them to mold the figure in a different pose than it's supposed to be displayed in) it wouldn't help. Multi-part molds (slide-molds) also don't help much, for various reasons. Again, there's the issue with the helmet - it tilts down and has that forehead visor - which means you need to mold the front of the helmet either straight-on or from a low angle to mold the face mask. But if you mold the head together with the rest of the body, then that same angle has to be used for the chest, the arms, the legs - about the best you could do would be to have a center slide-mold that slides in between the pilot's legs and arms and provides detail on his chest and helmet, and then another mold part coming from each side to mold his arms and legs. You would wind up with more mold parting lines and degraded details on the inner surfaces of the arms and legs... The Minmay figure would have similar issues, but you'd need to consider the back of the figure as well (since she's not going to be sitting in a cockpit which conveniently covers that up) Getting the gap between the right arm and the body would be pretty tough, especially if the left arm were to be extended forward... Slide-molds are also more expensive. Bandai would be spending more money to produce a lower-quality figure. Just doesn't make sense.

Never said they did. Nevertheless, other companies (and other divisions of Bandai, for that matter) have been making Valkyrie-related products. So I think it's ridiculous to claim that comparing with these other products is inappropriate. Just, like I said, you have to keep some perspective. Like exposed hinges and proportional compromise come with the territory of a transforming kit - so when comparing Bandai's Valk to the Hasegawas or something, you've got to cut 'em some slack. But it's still a valid comparison, as long as one doesn't unrealistically apply expectations from one product on the other. Likewise, the Yamato isn't a model kit... (Well, you know, except for the unpainted, unassembled Yamatos that were sold as model kits...) But model kit or not, the Yamato had to solve the same set of problems for their Valk design that Bandai did - the two took different paths obviously, and there's actually a great deal to be learned from a comparison like that - the strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches. Comparing to the 30 year old Imai variable just seems silly to me. When a new MG Gundam comes out nobody bothers comparing it to the original 1:100 Gundam, because hardly anybody bothers with that old kit any more, and it's generally assumed that a new product will be better in every way. Which was my point exactly.......you can build a bandai kit with a pair of snippers and nothing else. Yeah, you could even chew the parts off the runners with your teeth and slam your forehead down on the table to press parts together, if you wanted... More seriously: My point doesn't invalidate yours. I just thought it was pretty funny that you pointed out that you don't need to sand the inside of an intake on the Bandai kit given that it hasn't got intakes. That's like saying "You'll never have to clean your fingernails again! I've cut off your hands." It just would have been a much more impressive example of Bandai's ability to simplify model kits, if it had been an example that didn't involve them eliminating the part they were supposedly simplifying. Dude, I didn't say you were gushing. Some of this happened on other sites - the Gundam crowd tends to have a very distorted view of Bandai's merits versus those of its competitors... I vent about it here because it's a more sympathetic crowd. I say things not-negative about the kit, too, actually. I think Battroid mode is pretty good. Amazingly enough, there are even aspects of Bandai's battroid that I like better than Hasegawa's - which surprises me, frankly, because Hasegawa's Battroid is IMO just about the best mecha kit ever. And while I didn't like the battroid proportions at first, they have grown on me: I've found that one thing I enjoy about transforming kits is that, because the proportions have to work for transformation, the resulting kit is a more "honest" representation of how the machine could really look...

Most injection molds are just two parts, which means parts can't have under-cuts relative to the direction of mold separation. Minmay has to be molded from the front, so they can have some detail on her face and hair... But her arms have to be molded from the side, so she can have elbows, and detail on her hands and clothes. Likewise, the pilot figure's body has to be molded from the front to put detail on the chest, but the arms have to be molded from the sides so they can put the controls in his hands and properly detail his hands. Then there's the helmet - the body has to be molded from kind of a high angle to get both the chest detail and his legs and feet, but the helmet has to be molded from a lower angle in order to get the facemask under the visor. They could mold these as one-piece figures by altering the poses - for instance making the pilot rest his hands on his legs instead of having them on the controls, make Minmay hold the mic closer to her face and put her left arm down by her side or up in the air instead of allowing it to be straight forward... These are the sorts of compromises you'd typically see on a MG Gundam pilot figure. Splitting up the figure allowed them to make the figure better - and that's something I always appreciate. And seriously, it's like two drops of glue!

Nonsense. I mean, if Bandai were unable to surpass a 30 year old transforming glue-kit, that would be monumentally embarassing. I think there are better transforming Valks out there, but this kit doesn't need to be put in an exclusive league where it only has to compete with an early-'80s kit in order to look good by comparison. No comparison is going to be perfect, or perfectly fair, but everything's fair game for comparison, at least as long as one maintains a realistic perspective on what conditions are different, and why. So Hi-Metals, Yamatos, Hasegawas, etc. are all fair game Let's not forget one of the primary reasons you will never have to deal with smoothing out the intakes on the Bandai VF-1... The Bandai VF-1 doesn't have intakes. I think probably a lot of the Yamato fans feel like I (as a Hasegawa fan) feel: It is pretty frustrating to see people gush over the Bandai VF-1, act like there were no modern VF-1 kits or modern transforming Valks on the market until Bandai swooped in to save the day, or go on about how gorgeous the kit is and how amazing Bandai's engineering is. To me, the level of love the kit's receiving from its fans seems more than a little undeserved - and I swear, some of these folks must be showering the kit with love just because it came from Bandai... I can find no other explanation. I can appreciate Bandai's VF-1 for what it is, and the things I think it does well - I just am not inclined to overlook the kit's shortcomings.

Oh dear. How dreadful. These are 1:72 scale figures - a snap-fit peg the size of the figure's arm probably wouldn't be durable enough to survive assembly anyway. The only other option is to mold the figure all in one piece - which usually results in things like pilots with their hands in their lap instead of on the controls. Given that you need to paint those figures, they probably figure anyone who can't handle it wouldn't bother anyway.

well, for starters; a nose cavity plug system that doesn't require a removable part, a gunpod underbelly attachment method that doesn't require a removable part, and a GERWALK leg design at least as functional and effective the Yammie 1/60v.II. To suggest that everything Bandai apparently got wrong would have been better if they'd truly brought their A-game... It gives them too much credit I think. I mean, of all the MGs, how many even transform? Of those, how many transformations are on par with the Valkyrie? Zeta's about the only one IMO - the only one where the transformation makes the design really sensitive to proportional changes - and even then, Zeta's waverider mode isn't nearly as coherent as the Valkyrie's fighter mode.

There's not really a lot of room for anything like that... I only point out that MG is almost (or perhaps completely, at this point) exclusive to Gundam because Bandai has created other lines that are basically MG in everything but name - for instance Real Robot Revolution or the Votoms kits. I think Bandai's Macross kits are MG-quality as well - which has both good and bad implications.

MG is nothing more than a product line - and a mostly Gundam-exclusive one at that. What do you expect would be different if the kit were labeled "MG"?

Yeah, I can't un-see that strip of rectangles on the underside of the wings, personally... Battroid mode is growing on me, I feel like I'm shifting from "I see what they were going for and it was a good effort but it looks awkward and lanky" to simply "that's a pretty good battroid" Something about fighter mode still really throws me off, though. I think the dorsal fuselage just isn't big enough to offset the bulk of battroid parts being carried on the underside. I expect the Bandai would be a good kit for building a transformation sequence, but... 6 or more copies at 4500 yen each... gets kind of pricy.

This reaction surprises me, frankly. I thought the big head was one of the things Bandai got right. And, in fact, I think they went to great lengths to achieve this effect. I mean, in terms of transformation problems, I think the single biggest problem with the VF-1 is the chest-plate: the plane's fuselage has to be large enough to balance out the look of the nose and cover up all the stuff that's stashed away on the ventral side, so once it changes to Battroid mode suddenly the Valk has this huge billboard-chest. But one of the tricks of proportions in general is that it's mostly determined by immediate context. If the chest is big, it won't necessarily look out of place if the parts around it are similarly large. Or if the parts surrounding the chest are small, that will make the chest look more out of proportion. Typically the heads on transforming Valkyries are pretty small, because the head has to fit in between the legs in fighter mode - it has to be kept pretty narrow, so to avoid making it look skewed it's shrunk all-around. When I look at the Bandai Valk, there's a lot I don't like, but the head proportion is one thing I think they actually got right - making the head larger does a lot to balance out the size of the chest plate. But in a transforming model you can't change one thing without affecting other parts. The price paid for the big head is that the upper legs had to be narrower - the extra width for the head had to come from somewhere... Also, I think that hiding the extra bulk of the head in fighter mode is one of the reasons they made the upper legs (the area around the jet intakes) bulge downward more - which I think is one of the reasons I find the Bandai's fighter mode vaguely unsettling. They solved one problem with Battroid mode, but introduced others: maybe the worst is that the skinny upper legs aren't bulky enough to balance out the look of the unavoidably-large chest. The choices they made in desgning the leg joints (i.e. putting a lateral extension joint just barely above the knee so it could clear those.. whatever they are on the sides of the legs - meaning most of the upper leg winds up almost vertical in most poses we've seen) seems to worsen the problem. I think Bandai paid a high price for the big head, and comparing the design with the Yamato toys, I don't think it was worth it. But the head itself? I think it's pretty nice. Not a pinhead like most transforming Valks.

Is it just me, or are those intakes a bit oversized?

Much like "space is cold" this is a misconception. If you're anywhere close to a star, there will be light. Of course, colony fleets and such could be deep enough in space that there's no significant light sources nearby, but in the neighborhood of colony worlds there would almost always be direct exposure to the local sun, and without any pesky atmosphere getting in the way. Space (in the neighborhood of a sun) only looks dark because there's not much out there reflecting light back at the viewer.

Personally my priority list would be: 1: landing gear 2: missile bays 3: gunpod mechanism. I guess I'm not as into the idea of a spring-loaded (or whatever) mechanism for carrying the gunpod as other people are. Yeah, it was a distinctive VF-17 feature but it doesn't affect the looks of fighter or battroid mode. Missile bays, though, give it more stealth fighter cred... I'd be more inclined to show off missile bays than a pop-up gunpod. That said, I understand that compromises must be made, and I can appreciate people's interest in having the gunpod mechanism. I'm really impressed that Yamato took this one on. The VF-17 doesn't seem a particularly easy VF to make work "as advertised".

So what do you guys think about the Hasegawa color guide for this kit? (Hobbysearch listing...) I think the color on the control surfaces is a bit too light, but I'm not looking forward to having to adjust the color of the white kite logos to match...

Quality in that regard is pretty inconsistent in the Gundam Decal line. On some sheets, for instance, gray is printed as gray ink. On others, it's printed as dithered black and white. I think it has to do with how individual sheets are set up. But just about any time you have something with a lot of color range in it (gradients, photographs, or even just a lot of colors, like character art) you'll probably wind up with dithering. They would have to set up a large number of colors for printing in order to avoid that effect in such cases.

Right, yeah, I forgot that one. That's important. Thanks for the catch.

Wikipedia can be very educational. Basically, it's a process where you take some kind of screen (like a wire, silk, or nylon mesh) and apply a stencil to it (permanently attach a material to certain areas of the screen to block ink from passing through) - then you lay the screen down on something, and apply ink to the other side. Ink will travel through the areas of the screen not blocked off by the stencil, and when you remove the screen you'll have the desired pattern printed. It's very common as a way to create T-shirts, for instance. There are DIY kits for that kind of screen printing. But it looks like what we're talking about here isn't screen-printing at all - it's dithering or halftoning. That happens in any printing process, any time the colors you're trying to reproduce don't correspond to the inks you're using to reproduce them. Dithering of some sort is then the only way to approximate the color. If the design isn't made up of a few easy-to-reproduce colors it's bound to have some of this. Gradients of any kind will be a problem. The effect is terrible on a scale model IMO. Of course, you could simply mix the color you actually want and print with that - this is something that is within the realm of possibility for mass-produced decals and stickers. But I think it's cheaper to just use a consistent set of colors across a whole product line and dither anything that doesn't match up.

Well, not by definition. Screen printing just describes the process used to put pigment onto the decal carrier film. I think that's the main way mass-produced decals are made. But short-run or home-made decals can also be done on a printer.

Cool! I just got mine yeaterday, but haven't had much time to do anything with it yet. I was thinking about getting a 1:100 VF-25 as well... I'm not happy with the sticker situation with that kit but the price is nice at least. I'm thinking about getting multiples of that kit to do a transformation sequence build... But I'm trying hard to buy no more than one kit for each model I finish - strictly speaking I haven't built enough even to get the Thunderbolt, so I couldn't really get another kit beyond that anyway... If you're ordering from HLJ, there are tricks you can do to manipulate what gets shipped.

I would probably just scan the 1:100 sticker sheet instead - though printing decals carries additional limitations, like dithering if you're printing a color your printer doesn't provide. At the very least, though, one would probably be able to print them on ink-jet, since Alto's fighter has a fairly bright white as the background for everything.