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Any good?

Those are pretty tough to find in not so beat up condition these days. Great cover art there for sure. I know a few big frazetta fans that have posters of that same cover.

Nice

It’s Macross, not The Boys😁

Right? BTW: with that pic, I noticed something missing from it:

Nope! Before Megatron was revealed I'd have bet that was the case, but I'm happy to report that's not the case. They have similarities in that they're both tanks, both form their turrets from their arms and arm cannons with their back cannons making the barrel, and both have their chests end up at the front of the tank and legs (mostly) at the back. But that's about it. Near as I can tell, they have no shared parts. Transformation is quite different, too. Megatron's is sort of laying on his front, with his chest flipped up over his head. His legs rotate 180 degrees to form the rear treads, but the front of the treads are (mostly) his backpack. For Megatron, his waist detaches and double hinges so the bottom of his spine and the top of his pelvis are on the bottom of the tank. His head folds in and his chest flips up to form the front of the tank with the top of his torso. His back also opens up, and the joints that move the arms unfurl from inside his back. His shins combiner wars up over his thighs with his feet, which kind of tuck into the back of the tank, and his lower legs split, unfold, and wrap around the sides to form the entirety of the treads. IMHO, it's a more clever and interesting transformation, even if the turret still winds up looking kind of crappy. Anywho... kinda forgot about these Amazon-exclusive repaints until they showed up on my porch. They're a continuation of Amazon's previous exclusive capsules, in that they're a mix of Wreckers and Mayhem Attack Squad guys (with a little IDW comic stuff thrown in). In the first set, representing the Mayhem Attack Squad, we've got Carnivac. Carnivac himself is a straight repaint of Titans Return Weirdwolf, but he does come with some new accessories. Namely, we have a shorter tail sword, a brand new gun that's modeled after the G1 toy, and a new face. Now, there's a part of me that wants to say that Hasbro is pretty lazy here, reusing TR Weirdwolf for Carnivac just because they're both wolves when the G1 toys were nothing alike. Fact is, it actually does kind of work, though. As a Pretender, Carnivac didn't have the most detailed toy. In broad strokes, purple on the top with brown legs is correct. His chest is painted brown where the wolf's lower jaw sat (ala Slag). My biggest complaints are actually going to wind up being that his shoulders are too tall, he doesn't have the top of the wolf's head behind his bot head (again, ala Slag), and he has blue forearms and hands, which... ...is a concession to his alt mode, where blue forelimbs are now accurate. Though he still has molded eyes, he's got a painted visor like the G1 toy. His lower jaw and chest are accurately brown, too bad there isn't more of it on his back. There is some brown on his hips and thighs, which isn't accurate here but a concession to his bot mode. Most of the rest of his leg is blue; purple would have been better, and at first glance since it's covered in bot mode you might think there's no reason it couldn't have been, but a closer look tells me that those parts were on the same sprue as his forelimbs. The blue tail (which I believe is actually cast in purple plastic and painted blue) is accurate. Since he's repainted from Weirdwolf, Carnivac has to be a Headmaster instead of a Pretender. And we can see that while the face attached is new, the Titan Master carrying it on his back is the same. As a late G1 toy with a bad gimmick and no presence in the Sunbow cartoon or the Japanese sequels, Carnivac is a pretty D-list character (unless you were a fan of the Marvel comics). In that sense, it's a blessing to get any Carnivac, even if it's a repaint rather than a new mold. I just wish Hasbro would stop dipping into the dated, ball joint-heavy Prime Wars well. Carnivac's Wrecker opponent is Fisitron, aka Ironfist. Presumably, what with the Marvel character, Hasbro went with the more trademarkable Fisitron, a name which comes from his appearance in IDW's Last Stand of the Wreckers miniseries, where it was basically his screenname on the Cybertronian-equivalent of a r/Wreckers subreddit. With that in mind, you might be thinking, "Wasn't G1 Ironfist a sort of ugly butterscotch color? Why's he mostly gray here?" And the answer is, again, Last Stand of the Wreckers, where he kept the butterscotch shoulders, biceps, and pelvis but went with a light gray for his torso and lower legs. So my only real complaint, color-wise, is that his hands should be blue. Fisitron is a retool of Earthrise Hound/Detritus, who was already a retool of Siege Hound. While he is mostly Earthrise Hound, aside from a new head he's sporting a brand new backpack as well. And while he doesn't have the red eyes and headlights, or the big wheels under his chest or on his thighs that the G1 toy has, the mold does work surprisingly well for an IDW Ironfist. Again, my only real complaint would be Hound's bumper and winch. The backpack isn't the only thing new. He comes with this squarish bit, a yellow rifle, and a round bit. As a retool of a Siege toy there's lot of ports where you can mound the accessories on their own. However, the rifle fits inside the square bit with the barrel poking out, and the circle plugs on top of it, recreating the accessory of the G1 toy. Again, the bumper and which aren't doing Fisitron any favors, but with the new roof (which has a part that folds out of the backpack over his legs) goes a long way toward selling the idea that Fisitron is a Humvee and not a Jeep. Just like the G1 toy, the (combined) accessory plugs into the roof. It lacks the gimmicks of the G1 toy, though, so the barrel doesn't pump and the ammo drum doesn't spin (unless you spin it yourself... it is just a 5mm peg). I'm sure there's a handful of G1 purists who had Ironfist as a kid and wish that Fisitron were more accurate to the original toy, but again we're talking about a character who had really no appearance in any Transformers fiction until Last Stand of the Wreckers. What's more, Last Stand of the Wreckers is one of the most popular stories that IDW published, so for the majority of Transformers fans who even know who Ironfist is in the first place the IDW version is the definitive version. End of the day, though, these are both two extremely D-list late-G1 characters (in Ironfist's case, so late that he was repacked unchanged for G2). Fans of the old Marvel comics might want the set for Carnivac, and IDW fans (like me) will enjoy Fisitron, but the majority can probably ignore this set. As for the other set, we open with Mayhem Attack Squad member Spinister. Now, the original Siege release was already in accurate G1 toy colors, and mostly accurate to his appearances in IDW comics (save for later when his head was colored light gray with a purple mask). This new version is pretty similar, save for the blues below the belt and on his mask being darker and, his rotor and hands swapped for a darker gray (almost black), and his arms switching from pink to blue. Near as I can tell, it's based on his Transformers Universe profile in the Marvel The Transformers #65, but throughout the late Marvel run he was colored fairly inconsistently. The G1 toy was a double Targetmaster, a gimmick that was omitted from the Siege figure. Hasbro is rectifying that now; aside from colors the only difference between this Spinister and the Siege one is that he comes with repaints of the Targetmaster buddies that came with Needlenose and Windsweeper. Spinister has a very cool transformation that uses just one of his legs to make the cockpit while tucking the other up underneath and using his feet to form the wings. If you missed him the first time, he's definitely a toy worth checking out. If you didn't miss him, though? I mean, I strongly prefer the original colors, and I'm not super into the Targetmaster gimmick in general. But even if you were gung-ho on making sure Spinister has his Targetmaster pals, well, Singe was released as a standalone Battlemaster during Siege, and Hairsplitter (renamed "Shrute") came with Siege Skywarp in Amazon-exclusive Decepticon Phantomstrike Squadron pack. So if it were Spinister and his guns alone I'd say (again, unless you missed the Siege release) that he'd be an even easier pass than Carnivac and Fisitron, except... ...his opponent is Topspin, a Diaclone repaint of Titans Return Topspin. Who, aside from the Diaclone deco, is unchanged from the original toy. But here's the thing... we all know that Topspin goes with Twin Twist. And there's definitely some of us who picked up the Diaclone deco of Twin Twist when Amazon released him in their earlier Wreckers collection. People who thought, "man, I really hope they do a Diaclone Topspin to go with him." Well, it's that dang monkey's paw... you can have your Diaclone Topspin, but you gotta pay double and take a Spinister you don't really want or need, too. It's a dang shame, too, because, yeah, he's got too many ball joints and lacks the ankles that have become standard in the post-Siege world, and yeah being a Titans Returns figure means he's a Headmaster now, but is still a pretty cool mold, so it's hard to say no to him. I liked the regular deco, but I also dig this Diaclone deco. Man... Whether you're talking about the original releases or the Diaclone decos, Topspin and Twin Twist just belong together as a pair. So, I'm forced to rule thusly: if you don't have Siege Spinister, you should get this set for Spinister. If you do have Spinister already, then it's up to Twin Twist. Did you get the Diaclone version of him? Well, then you're obligated to get this set for Topspin, whether you want Spinster or not. The only way I can tell you to pass on this set entirely is if you already have Spinster and you're passing on BOTH of the Diaclone Jumpstarters.

I wish they'd do a transforming Battle 7 from Macross 7!

Yeah; by the way, if anyone needs them for theirs, they sent me a coupe of dozen!!O.o Let me know if anyone needs any!

Thanks for the clarification and additional info; I knew there had to be more to it than just what I was thinking, otherwise they'd have done it already. So basically, what the companies were showing us with "self driving cars" is mostly just smoke and mirrors to impress the public into thinking they're more advanced then they are, right? I would also assume it's to garner more investors and money from the government for research and development, but you know more than I do since you work in the field.

Thanks Thom! Yeah, I'm trying to make it look like shadowing and not a fire sale! I've always had trouble with sludge washes (no wonder I like X-wing models; they're supposed to look beat up!). Going to do more white drybrushing and detail painting to correct it. This is what I'm going for: This is Astronaut Bruce McCandless II; on the NASA Shuttle Mission STS-41B ( OV-099 Challenge,r Feb 3-11, 1984), he made history as the first astronaut to pilot the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) on the first untethered spacewalk in the history of spaceflight. This photo always resonated with me since they first showed it, but I never knew who the man in the suit was until a few years ago. Let me introduce him: The first picture is of McCandless in the Apollo Program in the 60's, while the second is of him 20 years later for the Space Shuttle missions. In this picture, he was serving as Capsule Communicator ("CAPCOM", main voice communicating to the astronauts aboard the craft ) for the Apollo 11 mission: It took him 20 years, but he finally got to space in the 1980's. As a former Navy pilot, he served aboard USS Forrestal and USS Enterprise (on the latter during the Cuban Missile Crisis), and was an electrical engineer (graduating with a BA in electrical engineering from the Naval Academy, 2nd in his class in 1958. His classmates: NSA Advisor John Poindexter and Sen. John McCain!). There's a ton more info about him at his Wikipedia entry (otherwise I'd be three pages deep talking about him!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_McCandless_II He was one of the designers of the MMU, and the first one to test it out in space! Sadly, by the time I discovered all of this, Mr. McCandless had passed away (December 21, 2017). I had wanted to meet him, but I missed him by 2 months. This is why it pays to examine the stories behind the things you find pics of or want to model; there are some truly incredible lives waiting to be discovered and read about if you're willing to look. And I want to do a diorama using the figure I modified that replicates the photo of him during his historic spacewalk.

I just checked the Marex Rogue listing on HLJ and it now says the figure will be released in August

I picked up this title today!

Can say the same, though they certainly took their time getting it here. Think it ran close to 20 days in transit, a week and a half of which was just sitting at LAX. Edit: Double checked, they left on May 14th, arrived May 31st. They arrived at LAX on the 20th, and didn't leave customs until the 29th.

I’m close to finishing my 3D scan and post-processing of the Strike armor. My post processing removed the hollow underside of the cannons. I hate “waffles.”

I'm tired of waiting! Whole generations of kids have grown and graduated school while I've been waiting for stuff and it sucks!

That's a good question we'll have to wait and see on their entry.

What about Pose+ 's version? Is that still coming out or has it turned into vapourware?

Actually I'm really looking forward to reading a photocopy version!! Best of both worlds. BTW I love your indie book Kit Carter Galactic Ranger. Seems like a homage to EC Comics. Good read?

That's a great cover, but you can't read 'em!

Happy to report that mine arrived with toy packaging in very good condition.

Preordered Megatron and Grimlock reissue yesterday. The Walmart listings are now taken down.

THRUST VECTORING OWNS THE SKY!!!

Transformers FG-01 VF-1S Jetfire.